THE 



SILENT HOUSE 



BY 



E. P. TENNEY. 




BOSTON: 

CONGKEGATIONAL PUBLISHING SOCIETY, 

BEACON STREET. 






4%. 



Copyright, 1876, E. P. Tenney. 



The Library 
of Congress 



WASHINGTON 



LC Control Number 




tmp96 027660 



BOSTON: 

Stereotyped by C. J. Peters & Son, 
73 federal street. 






INTKODUCTIOK 



Drelincourt's "Meditations on Death" had as 
remarkable a run, in its day, as any well written 
modern novel. First published in France in 1651, 
there were fifteen editions in forty-one years. It 
was published in nearly every country in Europe. 
There were more than twenty editions in England 
and Scotland in little more than a hundred years. 
Queen Mary, consort to William III., read it over 
seven times. De Foe was so much pleased with it, 
that he wrote a ghost-story for an introduction to 
one edition, the better to sell it, representing Mrs. 
Veal as coming from another world to recommend 
this book ; and the indorsement proved so popular, 
that it has been printed in every edition since. 
There have been, at least, three American editions. 
Drelincourt's fulness of learning, and quaintness 
of illustration, might warrant another edition : it 

3 



4 INTRODUCTION. 

would, without doubt, attract many readers, espe- 
cially if it were abridged, and edited with a view 
to meeting modern wants. It is hoped that the 
quotations acknowledged in the text, or referred to 
in the index, will whet the appetite of the reader to 
look up the original. The literature of the subject 
comprises other treatises, which were once widely 
read ; but there are so few readers of old books in 
our large libraries, that these authors now stand 
upon the shelves, year after year, without a reader. 

In preparing this little book, the writer has no 
ambition to take the place of the eminent French 
pastor ; but he is convinced that the interest in the 
topic is as permanent as the fact of our mortality. 
He has himself been strangely drawn toward it ; 
and a melancholy pleasure attaches to these studies 
upon " The Silent House." The contemplation of 
the phases of the subject brought to view in these 
pages has been a pleasing diversion in the season 
of summer rest. 

The text has not been largely cumbered with foot- 
notes. The citation of authorities is desirable in 
scientific treatises, but not in hortatory books. It 
would be easy to fill many pages b}^ a copious index 
and full notes ; but the character of this work does 



INTRODUCTION. 5 

not seem to call for substantiating every statement 
of fact, or verifying every quotation. I have, there- 
fore, fallen back upon the dictum of my right-hand 
literary adviser, — "If any are anxious to know 
about a point, the} r will hunt it up ; and, if they are 
not anxious to know, they will not thank you for 
telling them where to find it." The fidelity of an 
author can be easily tested. A few notes and a 
brief index are added to make clear some points, 
and to make easy reference to the leading topics. 
Scripture texts, commonly known to be such, are 
used without quotation marks. Persons not familiar 
with the Bible, who find any sentence particularly 
apt, may safely look for it in the Old or the New 
Testament. 

The writer is not without hope that these pages 
may be of service as a hand-book to those who are 
constant^ called to the bedside of the dying, to 
minister at the burial of the dead, or to remind the 
living of those events which will so soon come to 
ever\^ man. And, if this little volume is placed in 
the hands of any one who is walking toward home 
in the dark, it is believed that this may be a guide- 
book leading to the light. 





CONTENTS. 

a 


PAGE. 


I. 


Building in the Dust . 


. 9 


II. 


Near Home 


. 42 


III. 


The Dark Days . 


. 65 


IV. 


Searching for the Light 


. 91 


V. 


The Light . 


. 113 



THE SILENT HOUSE. 



BUILDING IN THE DUST. 

One of the greatest of all modern poets 
represents the planets as standing still in 
terror, and turning to ashen gray at the sound 
of the tolling hoofs of the death-steed ; the 
heavens terrified as the earth by the woe which 
followed sin. Other poets have pictured to us 
young Cain, watching for the appearing of 
Death, in the gloomy shadows at nightfall by 
Eden. For God had said to the father of man- 
kind, " In the day that thou eatest thereof, 
thou shalt surely die." Upon that day moral 
death entered the world. The fact that Adam 
lived between nine and ten centuries shows 

9 



10 THE SILENT HOUSE. 

that the emphasis of the penalty was moral, 
not physical. 

Physical death had long reigned over the 
brute creation. It was, indeed, believed in 
former ages, that the death of every living 
creature was caused by tasting the forbidden 
fruit at the hand of our first mother ; all par- 
taking in man's sin save one undying bird, 
which flew away from the temptation, and 
lives to this day in the deserts. It is, perhaps, 
commonly supposed, that, in like manner, the 
physical death of the human race is owing to 
Adam's sin. It is, however, likely, that men, 
at some period of advancement, would have 
been removed from this scene of life, even if 
Adam had kept his first estate. The reign of 
death over the lower animals before the appear- 
ance of man makes it probable that this world 
was not designed for the final abode of our 
race. It is unquestionably true, that the mode 
of the removal of man from this life might 
have been different, as in the case of Enoch, if 
sin had not entered. It is not safe to say that 
the removal of man from this planet is certainly 



BUILDING IN THE DUST. \\ 

the result of sin ; but it is true, that the amaz- 
ing brevity of life, compared with that of the 
fathers of the race, and the mastery of disease, 
and the mode of our passing out of life, are so 
intimately connected with sin as to make it 
suitable to speak of our own physical death as 
coming into the world with the fall of our first 
father. Physical as well as spiritual death 
began to take upon itself the shape in which 
we see it, upon the day when Adam broke away 
from God. So death entered by sin ; the decay 
of the body the symbol of the soul's disaster. 
The old curse which descended on Eden still 
overshadows us. Sin is all the time weaving 
shrouds ; and every grave to-day is dug by the 
divine justice. In the Mosaic law, it is pro- 
vided that when leprosy, a certain kind of 
mould, is found in the walls of a house, the 
whole building must be broken down : so, when 
sin has smitten the body, the body must be 
broken down and removed. Dust thou art, 
and unto dust shalt thou return. We dwell 
in houses of clay, whose foundation is in the 
dust, which are crushed before the moth. " The 



12 THE SILENT HOUSE. 

body," says an old writer, " is more astonishing 
in our life than in our death; as it is more 
strange to see dust walking up and down in the 
dust than lying down in it." 

Death is ttkivebsal. Death has passed on 
all, for that all have sinned. It is in a sinning 
world that we find it written, " One generation 
passeth away, and another generation cometh." 
There is a perpetual pilgrimage to the lands 
of death. Crusades of men, women, and little 
ones, are marching thither. Little do we think 
how constant is the procession to the tomb. 
Every day the sun gazes upon more than eighty 
thousand funerals. The bier never stands still 
for a moment. The tolling of the bell, and the 
fall of clods upon the coffin, are sounds familiar in 
every village. We merely ask, " Whose funeral 

is it?" 

" Whose feet to-day attain the goal, 
And put their sandals by, 
And, having filled their Lord's behest, 
Are laid to moulder in the rest 
Of many a century ? " x 

1 These lines were the last rhymes written by the author 
alluded to upon p. 120. 



BUILDING IN THE DUST. 13 

When we look over the lands which in every 
town are devoted to death, it is no wonder if 
such gloomy wastes alarm men. We dwell 
among the tombs. The sexton is undermining 
us all. The ruins of the race cover great tracts 
of country, like the ruins of vast cities. In 
peace and in war, death is busy strewing the 
continents with the dead. In our war for the 
Union, the very birds learned funeral-airs, and 
battle-fields were turned into cemeteries. But 
during those four years, in which it was esti- 
mated that more than three-quarters of a mil- 
lion soldiers died by disease or in battle, the 
ordinary work of death went on in the world 
as usual, and an army of more than three times 
the entire population of the United States was 
so quietly laid away under ground, that no one 
thought to speak of it. More are beneath the 
ground than above it. 

"All that tread 
The globe are but a handful to the tribes 
That slumber in its bosom.' ' 

The thirteen hundred millions now upon the 



14 THE SILENT HOUSE. 

earth, in a few years will be all gone. For 
more than fifty centuries, some have been dying 
each moment ; while now and then a great 
calamity has swept away many at once. 

" The dead are everywhere: 
The mountain side, the plain, the wood profound, 
All the wide earth, the fertile and the fair, 

Is one vast burial-ground." 

" The world," says Carlyle, " is built upon 
the mere dust of heroes, once earnest wrestling, 
death-defying, prodigal of their blood ; who 
now sleep well, forgotten by all their heirs." 
The grim humor of Holmes declares that, — 

" One half our soil has walked the rest, 
In poets, heroes, martyrs, sages." 

In England the old graveyards increase in 
height from century to century, the entire space 
piled up by the precious dust of those who there 
await the resurrection ; although, alas ! many 
graves are not respected. The bones of the 
dead, and their dust, have been often rudely 
cast out, raised before their time with shame 



BUILDING IN THE DUST. 15 

and contempt, and mingled with the common 
clods of the world. When Sir Christopher 
Wren laid the foundation of St. Paul's, he 
dug down through cemeteries piled one upon 
another, — English graves and Norman, Danish, 
Saxon, Roman, British. In some parts of 
Europe, the wreck of animal life of former 
periods of the world's history is spoken of by- 
scientific men as forming almost the entire soil 
in considerable regions of country. And one 
has gone so far as to say that " no small part 
of the present surface of the earth is derived 
from the remains of animals that constituted 
the population of ancient seas." 1 For example, 
more than ten thousand minute chambered 
shells have been found in an ounce and a half 
of stone taken from the hills of Tuscany. And 
extensive areas of land are made up in this 
way in various parts of the globe. Add to 
these cemeteries of shell-fish and land animals 
some thousands of generations of the human 
race, who have returned dust to dust, and the 
whole world itself is one vast tomb. 

1 Buckland: Bridge water Treatise, vol. i. pp. 112, 113, 116, 
117. 



16 THE SILENT HOUSE. 

"The wheels of Nature," said an English 
preacher, " are not made to roll backward : 
evey thing presses on towards eternity. From 
the birth of time, an impetuous current has set 
in, which bears all the sons of men towards that 
interminable ocean." " In reading the fifth 
chapter of Genesis," says a very suggestive 
commentator, " we seem to have entered the 
antediluvian cemetery, and to be slowly de- 
ciphering epitaphs of more than four thousand 
years' standing. Passing* from one gray tomb- 
stone to another, we notice that the inscriptions 
close thus, ' He died.' " " ' And he died,' ; and 
he died,' at the end of every name, rings out like 
a tolling bell." The generations of men run 
on, regardless of the dead, as the floods ran over 
the resting-place of Alaric. When the fierce 
warrior died, a river was turned out of its bed, 
that the great barbarian might lie down in its 
place ; then, over the grave the waters were 
turned again, and the stream swept along, as if 
no king was buried there. So the stream of 
the world rolls on, and the current of life hurries 
over the graves of the buried great. One day 



BUILDING IN THE DUST. 17 

men pause for the funeral ; but the next clay 
all the tide of life flows again. Joseph reigned 
in power; but he "died," — the individual, — 
" and all his brethren," — the family, — " and all 
that generation," — the world swept clean, — and 
straightway there rose a new king, who knew 
not Joseph. " So Tibni died, and Omri reigned." 
King after king mounts the throne, then lies 
down in the dust to make room for his suc- 
cessor. Will men mourn over our graves to- 
morrow ? Others yet will mourn over their 
graves the day after. Therefore move away, 
and make room for others. " Why," asks an 
old philosopher, "do you crowd the world?" 
So the generations of men perish like decaying 
nature. And the world does not miss a single 
man, more than some forest goes into mourning 
for one fallen leaf. 

" Majestic heaven 
Shines not the less for that one vanished star." 

Amid all the throngs of the dying, we are 
to fall unnoticed ; but " the day we die, 
though of no importance to the world, is to 

2 



18 THE SILENT HOUSE. 

ourselves of more importance than is all the 
world." To us it is the clay for which all days 
are made, and for which, all our days, we are 
preparing. 

If, for the sake of emphasis, it is suitable to 
make such a distinction, I will say that death 
is not only universal, but also impartial, 
showing no favor to any in its time of coming, 
or mode of attack. 

" Within the populous street, 
In solitary homes, in places high, 
In pleasure's domes, where pomp and luxury meet, 

Men bow themselves to die. 

The old man at his door, 
The unweaned child murmuring in wordless song, 
The bondman and the free, the rich, the poor, 

All, all, to death belong. 

The sunlight gilds the walls 
Of kingly sepulchres inwrought with brass ; 
And the long shadow of the cypress falls 

Athwart the common grass." 

Men might well run through the earth, . as the 
messengers at the time of the great plague in 



BUILDING IN THE DUST. 19 

London, crying through every street, " Bring out 
your dead ! Bring out your dead ! " x Does 
Death fail to heed the tears of the mourner? 
does he bid them flow afresh ? So, also, he 
heeds no gayety ; but his arrows crash into the 
house of our pleasures. It is written, " Both 
the great and the small shall die in this land." 
All graves are not of one length. As the 
death-angel is often watching by the cradle- 
side, eager to catch away life ere it is scarce 

1 The reader of WTiittier will recall a fine allusion to 
this night-cry, though used by the poet with a local applica- 
tion. A single word is changed. Works, p. 271, vol. i. 

" ' Bring out your dead ! ' The midnight street; 
Heard and gave back the hoarse, low call : 
Harsh fell the tread of hasty feet ; 
Glanced through the dark the coarse white sheet, 
Her coffin and her pall. 
* What, only one ! ' the brutal cartman said, 
As with an oath he spurned away the dead. 

How sunk the inmost hearts of all 

As rolled the dead-cart slowly by, 

With creaking wheel and harsh hoof -fall ! 

The dying turned him to the wall, 

To hear it, and to die. 

Onward it rolled ; while oft its driver staid, 

And hoarsely clamored, ' Ho! bring out your dead.' " 



20 THE SILENT HOUSE. 

begun, so, also, the old preacher tells us, death 
" stops its ears to the requests of trembling old 
age, and casts to the ground the gray heads as 
so many withered oaks." Death comes to 
middle life, takes the violent man from his 
crimes, and the just man from his knees. 
Death snatches the rich from his goods, the 
scholar from his books, the man of pleasure 
from his fashionable pursuits, the self-righteous 
from his good deeds : the worst and the best 
are borne away together. All ambitions are 
laid low : 

" High heart, high thought, high fame, as flat 
As a gravestone." 

Death is hewing down stalwart men engaged 
in great enterprises, holy and unholy ; and so, 
also, the humble in the earth are falling, day 
after day, by the hand of the great execu- 
tioner. Death holds his silent, solemn court in 
palace and hut. Tents and towns are alike to 
him. The Spanish proverb declares, that, " He 
tramples just the same upon the high towers 
of kings and the low cottages of the poor." 



BUILDING IN THE DUST. 21 

" It hath," again saith the preacher, " no more 
respect for the crowns of kings, the pope's 
mitre, and the cardinal's cap, than for the 
shepherd's crook, or the slave's chains." 

Now and then a man falls who makes half 
the earth quake : the globe is filled with terror ; 
the feeble tremble as they see the most mighty 
yielding to death. Death is this world's king. 
We might repeat to one another the words 
of the monarch in the old play : — 

" For Heaven's sake, let us sit upon the ground, 
And tell sad stories of the death of kings; 

. . . For within the hollow crown 

That rounds the mortal temples of a king 

Keeps death his court; and there the antic sits, 

Scoffing his state, and grinning at his pomp, 

Allowing him a breath, a little scene 

To monarchize, . . . 

. . . and, humor' d thus, 

Comes at the last, and with a little pin 

Bores through his castle wall, and — farewell, king! " 

Philip of Macedon had a page repeat in his 
chamber, morning by morning, " Remember, O 
king ! that thou art mortal." " He that is to- 



22 THE SILENT HOUSE. 

day a king to-morrow shall die." l " Memento 
mori " was the motto upon the seal of an em- 
peror in early ages. We read, that, in the 
Flowery Kingdom, a stone-cutter appears at the 
coronation of the emperor, with specimens of 
costly marble, saying, " Choose, O Celestial Em- 
peror, the stone beneath which thy bones shall 
one day rest." When the body of Constantine 
the Seventh, of the Eastern Empire, was borne 
forth to burial, a herald went before the f tmeral- 
train, crying, " Arise, O king of the world, and 
obey the summons of the King of kings." When 
Alexander the Great died, he ordered that his 
dead hands should be borne outside the bier, 
that all beholders might see them empty. The 
dying Saladin, if we are to believe old story, 
directed a messenger to take his shroud, fasten 
it to his flagstaff which had borne down so 
many battles, and carry it through the streets, 
crying, " This is all that is left of all his great- 
ness to the mighty Saladin ! " 2 Cyrus, em- 

1 Ecclus. x. 10. 

2 Thomas Fuller (p. 140, History of the Holy War. Lon- 
don, 1840) based npon Sabell. Enn. 9, lib. v. p. 378. When 
Gibbon (p. 267, vol. vii. : Boston, 1855) said that the Orientals 
knew nothing of this story, he probably had Fuller in mind. 



BUILDING IN THE DUST. 



23 



peror of Persia, chose this epitaph, " O man ! 
whatsoever thou art, and whencesoever thou 
comest, I know that thou wilt come to the same 
condition in which I now am. I am Cyrus, who 
brought the empire to the Persians : do not 
envy me, I beseech thee, this little piece of 
ground which covereth my body ! r : The dust 
of prince is very like the dust of beggar ; and 
the whirlwind sports with both. A Persian 
poet said that he saw a potter making pitchers 
out of clay which had been used once before in 
making the heads of kings and the feet of beg- 
gars. 1 We may all sing the old Spanish song : — 

11 Our lives are rivers, gliding free 
To that unfathomed, boundless sea, 

The silent grave: 
Thither all empty pomp and boast 
Roll, to be swallowed up and lost 

In one dark wave. 

Thither the mighty torrents stray; 
Thither the brook pursues its way, 

And tinkling rill: 
There all are equal. Side by side 
The poor man and the son of pride 
Lie calm and still." 

1 Kkeyani ; eleventh century. 



24 THE SILENT HOUSE, 

The death-sentence has passed on all men; 
and there is no partiality, and there is no 
escape : death is inevitable. All flesh shall 
perish together, and man shall turn again unto 
dust. All that go down to the dust shall bow 
before him ; and none can keep alive his own 
soul. Earth's millions are to enter the grave. 
It is appointed unto man once to die. There is 
a house appointed for all the living. It is re- 
served for them. All must call on the court of 
Death, and nod at his gate. We must needs 
die. What man is he that liveth, and shall not 
see death ? There is no man that hath power 
over the spirit to retain the spirit; neither 
hath he power in the day of death. " After 
such a number of hours," saith one, u it will 
unavoidably be night, and there is no stopping 
the setting sun." Sang Confucius, a few days 
before his death, — 

" u The great mountain must crumble, 
The strong beam must break, 
And the wise man wither away like a plant." 

Who can think to escape ? All men try foi 



BUILDING IN THE DUST. 25 

it. Even the fatalists seek safety in flight. 
" We are not worthy the high honor of ascend- 
ing to heaven so soon," said the pious Muslims, 
when they ran away from a plague-smitten city. 
In some of the savage tribes of Borneo, a cus- 
tom prevails of changing the name of any per- 
son who rises from a severe sickness ; as if, by 
a disguise and new personality, Death might 
be deceived when he should think to approach 
again. But every man falls when his time has 
come ; and there is no remedy. An Arabic 
fable tells us, that, as a man was one day walk- 
ing with King Solomon, they two met the 
Angel of Death. The man said to Solomon, 
" The Angel looks as though he wanted me. 
Order a wind to take me to India." Solomon 
did so ; and when he was gone, the king asked 
the Angel what he wanted. Said he, " I was 
just ordered to take that man's soul in India ; 
and I was wondering that he should be here 
with you." So my next neighbor went in sad- 
ness to his physician, saying, "I fear that Death 
wants me. Order me to go to a foreign coun- 
try." And now I have news that he died at 



26 THE SILENT HOUSE. 

his journey's end. Can any man escape ? At 
about such a time, in whatever place, the body 
will perish. Is there not, in the imagery of 
Eastern poets, a tree in paradise which bears a 
new leaf whenever a man is born into the 
world ? And is not the name of the new-born 
babe inscribed on that new unfolding leaf? 
When that leaf upon the hills of paradise 
begins to wither, the Death Angel goes forth 
for his soul. We fall like withered leaves. By 
the act of sin, our bodies are made lawful sub- 
jects of King Death. Our clay belongs to him ; 
and he will take it when the fatal hour strikes. 
" No words or gifts," says the Buddhist scrip- 
ture, " can conciliate him : no place is secure 
from his approach. He walks about night and 
clay : his territory has no bounds. There is no 
need of light or sun where he reigns. He enters 
the house without passing through the door ; 
and where he comes there is no escape." I 
have read that in one country of the Orient, in 
ancient times, the people did not die as else- 
where ; but on a particular day, once a year, 
they met on a plain near their chief cities, and 



BUILDING IN THE DUST. 27 

engaged in various amusements, " in the midst 
of which persons of every age and rank would 
suddenly stop, make a reverence to the west, 
gird up their loins, and, setting out at full speed 
towards that quarter of the desert, were no 
more seen nor heard of." They were called 
away by the Angel of Death, and went with him 
upon a swift journey through deserts, and over 
snow-clad mountains, and rivers of molten gold 
and silver, and at last lay down upon a verdant 
plain in the midst of a desert; and the turf 
opened like a grave, and swallowed them up. 
But, under whatever fable we disguise it, it is 
always death, as threatened in Eden. When 
you have come to the bound of life, you must 
cease your journeying. 1 

God marks each one of us, pointing us out 
to the deadly messengers, as a forester indicates 
trees for the wood-chopper. So, in our early 
colonial days, the officers of king or queen 
used to go through our forests, and place upon 

1 In the words of M. Antoninus, — Meditations: "Thou 
hast embarked, thou hast made the voyage, thou art come 
to shore: get out!" 



28 THE SILENT HOUSE. 

certain trees the broad arrow of the British 
navy, indicating that, one after another, they 
should fall, and be put to the service of the 
State. I myself bear a mark, to fall I know 
not when. The first gray hair is changed by 
the silver finger of the Death Angel : he is pre- 
paring the body to lie down in the dust. So 
bear we, upon our own heads, reminders of the 
grave, like those pious Mussulmans who wear 
the turban, which represents the pall of the 
dead. 1 Do I stand in no need of the burial 
robe? My winding-sheet may be already on 
the shelf. Already, most likely, the bier is 
made on which my clay will be borne to the 
grave. In some forest is growing my coffin; 
or perhaps it has gone through the mill, and 
the carpenter has handled it, and it may be 
waiting for me at this hour, in some unknown 
shop, whose door I pass unheeding. And the 
graves are ready for me. Somewhere is a burial 
lot for me, I know not where ; but there the 
grass is now springing, and the birds are sing- 
ing as they fly over it or sit in branches hard 

1 Vanibery, Travels in Central Asia: London, 1864. 



BUILDING IN THE DUST. 



29 



by ; or the snoAvflakes now spread a great white 
sheet there, and the winds are there singing the 
wild songs of winter ; or perhaps the sea-birds 
are screaming, and the waves are clapping their 
hands over the last resting-place of this diseased 
and weary body. How happy, if my death day 
is to me a day of joy — better than having any 
house above ground ; my pilgrim soul entering 
that day into the house not made with hands. 

Death we cannot escape. May we not, then, 
like men, turn about, and make a friend of 
death ? The penalty of sin has passed on all. 
Death is universal, impartial, inevitable. Come 
it will, — the last look on the earthly, the clos- 
ing eyes, the laying-down of the body in the 
narrow house, the opening of the eyes of the 
soul upon the eternal world, the standing before 
the final Judge, — come it will ; and the wise 
will make ready. 



Did you never think that death is always 
close upon us, always sudden, unexpected, since 
we always put far off the day of our own dying, 
so that, whenever we lie down to die, it will be 



80 THE SILENT HOUSE. 

a new and surprising thing to us that our own 
turn has come at last ? The Egyptian kings no 
sooner began to reign than they began to build 
their sepulchres ; yet, of fifty royal tombs at 
Thebes, not one is finished. The Pharaohs were 
surprised by Death before they were ready for 
him. " Death is deaf," says the Spaniard, " and, 
when he knocks at the door of life, is alway in 
ahurry, and will not be detained, either by fair 
means or force." An ingenious writer of the 
sixteenth century represents Death as convers- 
ing with his victims, as if he would know their 
miserable excuses for delaying his work. " Were 
I not absolute over them," says the rider upon 
the pale horse, " they would confound me with 
their long speeches ; but I have business, and 
must gallop on." 

" Of all the gods, Death only craves not gifts: 
Nor sacrifice, nor yet drink-offering poured 
Avails ; no altars hath he, nor is soothed 
By hymns of praise. ' ' 

How many of Death's messengers give abso- 
lutely no warning. In the tornado, Death rides 



BUILDING IN THE DUST. 31 

swift as the whirlwind. A burning mountain 
pours destruction upon crowded cities in a 
moment. Dwelling-houses become tombs, when 
the earth itself is rising and falling like the 
waves of the sea. Men, women, and children 
are, in a second of time, snatched from their 
ordinary employments, and hurried at once into 
eternity. " I was sitting, playing with my kit- 
ten, and just going to breakfast," says a writer, 
when Lisbon was destroyed. " I had one slip- 
per on, and the other was in pussy's mouth, 
when my attention was roused by the sudden 
sound of thunder. The floor heaved under me, 
and I saw the spire of the Church of the Holy 
Virgin come tumbling to the ground like a 
plaything overturned by a child. I rushed into 
the street, unknowing what I did and where I 
went, and beheld such a scene as made it come 
into my mind that the end of all things was at 
hand, and that this was the judgment-day ap- 
pointed by God. By this time the air was filled 
with the screams of the mangled and the dying. 
The dwellings of men, the trophies of conquest, 
the temples of God, were falling all around me, 



32 THE SILENT HOUSE. 

and my escape appeared impossible. I made 
up my mind for death." We read in the 
ancient records of Israel that a wall fell upon 
twenty-seven thousand of the men left. Ca- 
lamities like that of the Pemberton Mill in 
Lawrence are of old time, and common to all 
ages. 

Death rides as figure-head of our great ships 
of life, or at the helm ; and in mist, or storm, 
or sunshine, men perish, going down into the 
waters of death as a ship suddenly sinking at 
sea. A packet strikes an iceberg, and many 
passengers go down asleep. The cyclone comes 
sweeping through the sky, without cloud or 
warning, often not even touching the surface 
of the sea to ruffle the smooth waves ; but in an 
instant the masts may be torn out of the ship 
or the ship founders, and all the crew sink 
unheralded into the gloomy caverns of the 
deep. There is only one moment of time be- 
tween voyaging in the Indian Ocean or the 
Chinese seas, and sailing the unknown waters 
of the realms of death. Or how often, upon 
the land, there is one crash, and a throng of 



BUILDING IN THE DUST. 



33 



swift travellers are lying beside the track, amid 
the ruins of a train, 

" How many souls o'ertake, ere night, 
The prayer they poured in the morning light! " 

Death is always close at hand. It is writ- 
ten : — 

" If a man could see 
The perils and diseases that he elbows 
Each day he walks a mile, which catch at him, 
Which fall behind him as he passes, 
Then he would know that life's a single pilgrim, 
Fighting unarmed amongst a thousand soldiers.' ' 

Death is ever close by us, though he be 
noticed only as the beating of our own hearts is 
noticed in moments of fear. This fact is the 
grand secret which has given popularity to those 
singular pictorial representations that have ap- 
peared now and then in times past, some in ages 
quite remote. " Death " is not much called for 
in our public libraries ; but the pictorial lite- 
rature of the subject is by no means without 
interest. Every little while, some artist has 
turned preacher, and shown the figure of Death 



34 THE SILENT HOUSE. 

mingling in our common pursuits. For exam- 
ple, a countess is represented as receiving from 
lier maid a splendid dress ; and Death stands 
behind, placing a necklace of bones about her 
neck. A fop and a fine lady are exhibited in 
the latest style ; but one-half of each figure shows 
the skeleton. Death is pictured as helping gird 
the armor upon a warrior in the morning that 
he goes forth to be slain. It is Death who leads 
a blind man by the hand to the last fatal step. 
A youthful poet sits penning an ode to Immor- 
tality; and Death stands grinning behind his 
chair. An artist paints the figure of Death 
with his scythe ; and, in a moment after, he 
himself feels the clipping of the scythe. The 
Great Destroyer is pictured in the act of remov- 
ing a wheel from a carriage upon the street, or 
attacking a ship at sea, breaking the mast, and 
preparing to plunge all into the deep. Death 
" waylays the alderman in the last spoonful of 
turtle." Hogarth, in the last work that he did, 
painted what he thought about his own nearness 
to death : it was called " The World's End," 
representing the wreck of all things. There was 



BUILDING IN THE DUST. 35 

a ruined tower and a crumbling crown, a map 
of the world on fire, an old broom worn to the 
handle, an unstrung bow, a broken bottle, and 
a cracked bell, a waning moon, a stranded ship, 
the scythe and glass of Time broken, and a 
painter's palette broken with it. 

So Death is always near by, watching us, and 
turning his hour-glass, waiting for our sands to 
run out. Death approaches secretly, as the 
unseen springs of a watch cease to uncoil, or as 
the clock-weight runs down unseen. One mo- 
ment it is ticking, then it ceases. You know 
not how soon life will stop. Daily dying, we 
draw near to death every day by a certain num- 
ber of steps: on the actual day of dying, the 
same steps are taken ; and they lead into the 
open grave. We are nearing the grave daily, 
although engaged in various occupations ; as 
men on a ship are borne towards their port in 
hours of slumber or of diverse employments. 
Little by little we are approaching our final 
destiny. We walk in our common paths, and 
there is nothing unusual to warn us of the near- 
ness of the eternal world ; and the last steps are 



36 THE SILENT HOUSE. 

taken before we are aware of it. If we are to 
die by lingering illness, we go to our bed, and 
deliberately lie down upon it, to rise no more ; 
or, if we are to die suddenly, we carefully and 
surely and boldly and thoughtlessly, pick our 
steps to the place where we are to fall. Here 
is a neighbor, perhaps, who is at work in his 
orchard, and he suddenly loses his hold, and 
drops to the ground, and is dead. And here is 
a place, by the side of our highway, where man 
and beast stop to quench their thirst. A stran- 
ger, in alighting from his carriage, makes a mis- 
step ; and we see him on the ground under the 
iron hoofs, and he is dead. When the fatal hour 
arrives, the life is ended, whether it be by the 
hand of disease, or of distressing accident. So 
it is that men step from their common business 
into the presence of God. 

If, therefore, we are doomed to die by strange 
deaths on account of sin, and if the sentence 
embraces the whole human family, and if no 
condition is exempt, and if death is certain as 
the decrees of fate, and if we are to be surprised, 



BUILDING IN THE DUST. 37 

as it were, without warning, we shall act wisely 
if we are always prepared for it. Those who 
are exposed to great peril should be always 
ready to die. In respect of danger, this planet 
we call home is a mere powder-mill, and any 
moment may send us flying hence. But un- 
heeding men do not think. A blinding pros- 
perity may bear one to the very edge of the 
grave. Waving harvests, rising warehouses, 
increasing riches, and the joys of life, song and 
fruit and flower, may be ours even up to the 
very 'morning of our last sunrise. u In an hour 
that he is not aware of," the Lord cometh. See- 
ing, then, that all these tilings shall be dissolved, 
what manner of persons ought ye to be in all 
holy conversation and godliness ? Said Rabbi 
Eliezer to his disciples, — 

" Turn to God one day before your death." 
" How can man," they asked, "know the day 
of his death ? " 

"True," answered Eliezer: "therefore, you 
should turn to God to-day ; perhaps you may 
die to-morrow : thus every day will be employed 
in turning to him." 



38 THE SILENT HOUSE. 

It is certain you will die, uncertain when. 
Do you put on airs as if to live on the earth 
forever ? Will you build a house at the grave's 
mouth? Your pulse will quickly cease, your 
eyes darken, your face pale, your frame chill ; 
men will forget you ; and others will move into 
the home you now occupy, and make merry in 
the room where you died. 

If I revisit, for the first time in twenty years, 
a town in which I once knew all the families, I 
am startled at the havoc death has made : whole 
families have moved into the burial-ground. I 
feel my insecurity, and, for the moment, won- 
der at my own escape. But it is only for the 
moment. My mind turns like that of Justice 
Shallow : — 

" The mad days that I have spent ! And to see 
how many of mine old acquaintance are dead ! " 

Silence. — " We shall all follow, cousin." 
. Shallow. — " Certain, 'tis certain ; very sure, 
very sure. Death, as the Psalmist saith, is cer- 
tain to all : all shall die. — How a good yoke of 
bullocks at Stamford Fair?" 

The price of oxen will not allow long moral- 



BUILDING IN THE DUST. 



39 



izing on the certainty of death. So the world 
goes. We shall soon die ; and we stand like 
brutes, gazing into the barnyard. What is the 
price of bullocks ? 

" All men think all men mortal bnt themselves." 

" Well, what do you think of the world to 
come?" — " Truly, my lord, I think of it as 
little as I can." l But no effort to keep out of 
mind all thoughts that relate to death and eter- 
nity can change the circumstances in which we 
find ourselves. It is with us in this life as if 
we were transacting our common business in 
ferrying to and fro upon some strong current, 
like Niagara, which will, on some unknown day, 
certainly bear us over the rapids and the preci- 
pice into the eternal world. Frequently, by 
sickness or accident, we are actually borne 
downward almost to the brink : God arrests our 
course, and brings us back to our ordinary em- 
ployments. We are to make it one of our em- 
ployments, every day, to prepare for the hour 
when Ave ourselves shall quit our hold upon 

1 Swift's Polite Conversation. 



40 THE SILENT HOUSE. 

the earth to enter the unseen world. Are not 
graves opening all around us ? By the newly* 
opened graves let us lay aside all our careless 
unconcern for the eternal world, that we maj^ 
prepare in good earnest for the life to come. 
Can we long tread these streets ? There are 
whole fields not far from us, which are billowed 
with graves. Our ordinary employments call 
upon us to go past the sleeping-places of the 
dead. Do we never think to pause, and count 
the faces that are turned upward ? How many 
eyes are closed close under our feet ! Close 
beside our path are many feet crossed, — feet 
once busy, walking where we walk to-day, now 
waiting to move toward the bar of judgment. 
Ere our feet are crossed, and we lie down beside 
them, let us make many steps on the highway 
of heaven. Men are so engrossed in their com- 
mon affairs, that they need the very touch of 
the dead to arouse them. It is said that the 
ancient Thebans used to carry coffins into their 
banquet-rooms, that they might never forget 
the presence of death at every festival. Almost 
every day we are brought into contact with 



BUILDING IN THE DUST. 



41 



some coffin. We are called from our regular 
work to attend upon the dying, to bury the 
dead, and to weep over the grave, Shall not 
such scenes remind us of our own nearness to 
Death, and of his inevitable approach to us ? 
It is related that a man was once drifting in the 
sea upon a life-preserver, after a wreck. He 
was alone in the night, floating in the darkness ; 
and his soul was in dense darkness, and he 
expected to die before the morning. He was a 
bad man. He had long despised Christ, and he 
still rejected him. He could not, during two 
hours, make up his mind to apply to Jesus for 
mercy, when, suddenly, the body of one dead, 
borne on the waves, struck him. This broke 
the spell ; and he gave himself up to God at 
once, and found Christ as his personal Saviour. 
Is it possible that any one can be so insensible 
as to receive no shock from the sudden touch 
of the dead ? 

" Be wise to-day; 'tis madness to defer." 



Prepare to meet thy God. In such an hour as 
ye think not, the Son of man cometh. 



42 THE SILENT HOUSE. 



II. 

NEAR HOME. 

In some year, it will be written of each of us, 
as once of the lying prophet, " This year thou 
shalt die." It will be written, — This year, thy 
clay shall crumble, and thy spirit flee ; this year, 
thine eyes shall close to this world, and open 
upon eternal scenes ; this year, the music of 
earth shall cease to please thine ear, and thou 
shalt hear immortal songs or wailings. Shall 
that busy tongue of thine this year go down 
into the land of silence ? Shall thy feet step 
off the brink of the common life to visit the 
grave ? Shall thine industrious hands be sud- 
denly folded, and laid to rest ? 

This year thou shalt die. This year, — before 
the winter snows are gone, or in the bright 
spring-time, or in the heated summer, or in the 
burdened autumn, — thy body shall enter a new 



NEAR HOME. 43 

grave. This year thou shalt die. Thou, the 
strong child, or youth, or man, or hoary head. 
Thou enfeebled one, having had so long the 
finger-marks of death about thee, thou shalt go 
to thy grave. Thou, the man of large plans 
and pressing business, and thou who only seek- 
est bread for a day. Careless one, thoughtless 
of God and eternity, thou shalt this year enter 
the unseen world. Praying man, this year thou 
shalt die, and see God. Mourning one, this 
year thy tears shall cease. 

Suddenly and soon your eyes will be opened 
to behold another world. Perhaps not this 
year is it written of you, — This year thou shalt 
die ; but soon it will be. A few more vain 
struggles of vain days, and all will be over: 
your funeral prayer will be said, and you will 
be beyond the reach of prayers. No one looks 
to die this year. Many are ill fitted to die this 
year. Yet who knows whether his own name 
may not be on the secret record, where it is 
written, — This year thou shalt die ? 

We shall readily believe that we are liable to 



44 THE SILENT HOUSE. 

die at almost any moment, and that we shall die 
very soon, if we consider the ancient Scriptures, 
which set forth to us, by various symbols, the 
brevity of life. And if, besides, we look about, 
and see with what armory death is furnished in 
the diseases which finally carry us off, we shall 
think there is nothing certain about life, save 
its uncertainty. And we shall ask each other 
whether we ought not, as men of good judgment, 
to make certain preparation for certain death. 

The Scriptures continually remind us that 
our spiritual treasures are given us in earthen 
vessels. The men of the East saw the imagery 
of death appearing in the common transactions 
of the daily life. The story-telling Orient is 
reminded by the great Hebrew lawgiver, that 
we spend our years as a tale that is told. The 
exciting plot is quickly finished. We hurry 
•from one incident to another, and it soon ap- 
pears how all will end : the tragic scenes and 
the comic are talked over, and death carries us 
away. The lives of a thousand and one men 
are very like the Thousand and One Arabian 



NEAR HOME. 45 

Nights ; each tale occupying the attention for 
an hour, and then it is gone by forever. Again, 
some called death a sleep : we do not notice 
that we are asleep till we wake .up, and it is all 
over. Zophar, the Naamathite, reflected on the 
unsubstantial nature of dreams : and he said 
that the memory of a man's life upon the earth 
would fly away like a dream, and not be found; 
chased away as a vision of the night. 

The sacred poets, also, looked upon the 
handcraft of men as declaring most forcibly 
the shortness of our life. When, for example, 
Job saw the weavers at their work, and the 
swift-flying shuttle, he said, that, every time' it 
passed across the loom, it was like one of his 
days, running so quickly. And when King 
Hezekiah saw the workman cutting his thread 
or his web, he said that was the way disease 
had nearly cut off his life. When, also, the 
king, journeying through the country, saw the 
little shelter-tent of a shepherd on the hillside, 
with the flocks grazing near by, and then, on 
returning the next clay, saw that the tent- 
dweller had gone, he looked upon it as the 



46 ' THE SILENT HOUSE. 

symbol of his own life, which would be re- 
moved like a shepherd's tent. And when a 
royal messenger went through the country, 
riding in hot haste, — appearing over the rim 
of a basin in the desert, dashing through it, 
and disappearing over the next ridge, — an 
old patriarch stood in his tent-door, and said, 
"My clays are swifter than a post; they flee 
away, they see no good." And he who looked 
forth upon the Red Sea or the blue Mediter- 
ranean, and saw white sails, then, in an hour, 
looked and saw them no more, said that the days 
of man are passing away like the swift ships. 

So, too, when these thoughtful men looked 
abroad upon the objects of Nature, it was only 
to see Death riding in the sky, or darkening 
the earth. The sky above, and the earth 
beneath, are covered with the signs of our mor- 
tality : fleeting clouds, and falling leaves, and 
fading grasses are everywhere expressing the 
fact, that under the unchanging heavens, and 
on the enduring earth, all things are passing 
away, like the vain life of him who is proudly 
called " the lord of creation." A voice said, — 



NEAR HOME. 47 

Cry. And lie said, What shall I cry? All 
flesh is grass, and all the goodliness thereof is 
as the flower of the field : the grass withereth, 
the flower fadeth ; because the spirit of the 
Lord bloweth upon it : surely the people is 
grass. We hear the mowers in the heat of 
summer ; but it is always harvest-time with 
the reaper Death. Every day is heard the 
sharp ring of his scythe. But as men sigh, 
and move straight on when flowers fade, so 
the work of death is scarcely heeded. " We 
all do fade as the leaf," said the Hebrew 
prophet. Men appear on the earth like forest- 
leaves, and they perish in myriads year by year. 
So, too, the Greek poet saw the generations of 
men coming and going : — 

" The wind in autumn strews 
The earth with old leaves ; then the spring the woods 

with new endows : 
And so death scatters men on earth ; so life puts out 

again 
Man's leavy issue." 

These imaginative people of the Orient, in 
like manner, watched the shadows day by day ; 



48 THE SILENT HOUSE. 

and they said, that man fleeth as a shadow, 
and continueth not. Again one prayed, " Re- 
member that my life is wind." Yesterday a 
wind murmured, shrieked, and was no more ; 
to-day the breeze sings sweetly, or drearily 
howls and dies ; to-morrow another and an- 
other wind may sweep over the earth : and so 
it is with the lives of men, — "a wind that 
passeth away, and eometh not again." "As 
the whirlwind passeth, so is the wicked no 
more." Life, moreover, is like a cloud driven 
before the wind, — a cloud dark and gloomy, or 
bright in the noonday, or painted at sunset, — a 
vapor that appeareth for a time, then vanisheth 
away. ,What is your life ? It is consumed 
like a cloud, melting into the blue of heaven, 
or borne beyond sight by the breath of the 
tempest. 

One of our own poets has said, — 

1 ' I am : how little more I know ! 
Whence came I ? Whither do I go ? 
A centred self, which feels and is; 
A cry between the silences ; 
A shadow-birth of clouds at strife 
With sunshine on the hills of life; 



NEAR HOME. 49 

A shaft from ISTature's quiver cast 
Into the future from the past; 
Between the cradle and the shroud, 
A meteor's flight from cloud to cloud." 

The great dramatic poet of England has 
given us the seven ages of man, — the mewling 
infant, the whining schoolboy, the sighing 
lover, the bearded soldier, the well-rounded 
magistrate, the tremidous old man, and the 
second childhood. So men and women pass 
over the world's stage as mere players. If, 
likewise, we open our Scriptures, we find dif- 
ferent words, for seven ages, to represent man's 
life. At first, human existence was measured 
by centuries. But the Ninetieth Psalm records 
threescore and ten years as the limit of life. 
Job, however, spoke not of years, when he 
declared that the number of a man's months is 
with God. Again, it was said that man that is 
born of a woman is of few days. Once more, 
prayer is made that God will wait till a man 
accomplish as an hireling his day; as though 
one day's work might cover it all. A New 
Testament saint, who reflected much on the 
4 



50 



THE SILENT HOUSE. 



future blessedness which will never cease, de- 
clared that our light affliction in this life is but 
for a moment. And one dwelling under the 
shadow of Him who is from everlasting declared 
unto God, "Mine age is as nothing before thee." 
The centuries give place to years ; the years, to 
months ; the months, to clays ; the clays, to one 
clay ; one day, to a moment ; the moment, to a 
cipher, as the true symbol of the life of man. 

The philosophers and poets of every age 
have delighted to set forth the brevity of life 
by like symbols. The poet Euripides called 
life " a little day." Aristotle described certain 
creatures on the River Hypanis, that live only 
one clay : those which die at eight in the morn- 
ing die in youth, and those that die at five in 
the evening reach old age: so the life of an 
aged man is little longer than that of a child. 
Do we weep for one who has gone before noon- 
day? Our separation is short, since we our- 
selves shall follow before nightfall. When Sir 
Thomas More was threatened with death, he 
answered, " Is that all, my lord ? Then, in good 
faith, the difference between your Grace and me 



NEAR HOME. 51 

is but this, — that I shall die to-day, and yon 
to-morrow." When Saadi met a man in Damas- 
cus, who was dying at one hundred and fifty 
years old, he heard him lamenting, " I said, 
coming into the world by birth, ; I will enjoy 
myself for a few moments.' Alas ! at the varie- 
gated table of -life I partook of a few mouth- 
fuls ; and the fates said, ; Enough ! ' " 

Shadow, cloud, smoke, wind, swift arrow, 
fading flower, bubbles rising and breaking on 
the stream, snowflakes falling on the sea, — 
these are the emblems of life. Is the body 
called the house of the soul, it soon crumbles ; 
is it the tent, the tabernacle, it is moved away ; 
is it the clothing of the soul, the vesture soon 
decays ; is it called the casket holding a precious 
jewel, the clay cracks, and the treasure is 
removed. " Surely every man walketh in a vain 
show." So many die everyday, that men think 
of it as of the common sunset, or the fading of 
the rainbow from a summer sky. A man's 
cradle and his coffin may be made from the 
same tree. Life is a short journey, but very 
grievous ; as one makes a painful passage over 



52 THE SILENT HOUSE. 

rough seas between ports near eacli other. He 
who floats for a moment on life's troubled 
waters soon sinks beneath the waves ; and the 
noise of the sea, — the rush and tumult of tide 
and storm, — is still lifting up its voice as 
proudly as before. Unmeasured years are in 
the eternal state ; and the years that can be 
counted soon go by, like the ships which pass 
out of shallow harbors into the deep sea. 

We shall do wisely, if we all join in the 
prayer of the man of God : " So teach us to 
number our days, that we may apply our hearts 
unto wisdom." " Of all numbers," said the 
Puritan pastor, " we cannot skill to number 
our days. We can number our sheep, and our 
oxen, and our coin ; but w r e think that our 
days are infinite, and, therefore, we never go 
about to number them. We can number other 
men's clays and years, and think they will die 
ere it be long, if we see them sick, or sore, or 
cold; but we cannot number our own." And, 
if we turn to the Genevan Reformer, we hear 
him saying, " Even the most accomplished ac- 
countant is unable to calculate the fourscore 



NEAR HOME. 53 

years of his own existence. . . . They can tell 
how far asunder are the several planets, and how 
many miles it is from the centre of the moon 
to the centre of the earth; but they cannot 
measure the threescore years and ten which 
divide the cradle from the grave." We see, all 
around us, men spending their lives in reckon- 
ing, who find it difficult to count up their own 
age ; and, as they approach the limit of life, 
they heed not the increasing years. In Eng- 
land, a man l has been, for some time, employed 
in reckoning up the limitations of life ; and it 
is found, that, where a million persons set forth 
together, more than a quarter part die before 
they are past five years old ; nearly four hun- 
dred thousand of them drop out by the way 
before thirty years are past ; at forty-five, only 
one-half still pursue their journey; at seventy, 
only twenty-three men out of a hundred main- 
tain the thinned ranks ; at fourscore and ten, 
ninety and nine in every hundred have become 
weary of the road, and repose in the last sleep ; 
at the end of the century, only two out of ten 

1 Dr. Farr, register-general. 



54 



THE SILENT HOUSE. 



thousand still struggle forward; and soon the 
work of numbering is finished. But is it not, 
we ask, a mistake, to say of any man that he 
has really lived a hundred years ? Some, per- 
haps, have remained upon the earth so long. 
But, when we ask how much true living there 
has been, we must apply to the ancient Jews, 
who, in numbering man's days, took out in one 
stroke one-half the years for sleep, and then all 
the years of youth whrch Solomon called van- 
ity, then the days of sorrow, in which a man 
would rather die than live, — and what is left 
is called life. Who can so number his days, 
and look on them as desirable ? Let us hear 
the voice of Augustine : " Sooner or later every 
man must die ; and we groan and pray, and 
travail in pain, and cry to God that we may 
die a little later." " Men desire thousands of 
days, and wish to live long here: rather let 
them despise thousands of days, and desire 
that one which hath neither dawn nor darken- 
ing, to which no yesterday gives place, which 
yields to no to-morrow." 



NEAR HOME. 55 

Our sense of the brevity of life, and the 
nearness of the eternal world, may, perhaps, be 
quickened, if we turn to look upon some of 
the weapons which death is always handling hi 
the assault upon human life. 

The Scandinavian mythology relates that 
Hela, or Death, dwells in the hall Elvidnir; 
that Hunger is her table, and Starvation her 
knife ; that she is waited upon by Delay and 
Slowness for man and maid ; that her bed is 
Care ; and that Burning Anguish furnishes the 
hangings of her apartments ; and that her 
threshold is a precipice. In some strange pal- 
ace, Death is now holding high court ; and the 
attendants bear names that strike terror into 
the human soul. Famine invades the country, 
and pestilence breaks in upon the city. There 
is heard a great cry ; for there is not a house 
where there is not one dead. 

" The plague runs festering through the town, 
And never a bell is tolling; 
And corpses, jostled 'neath the moon, 
Nod to dead-cart's rolling. ,, 



56 



THE SILENT HOUSE. 



An eminent German physician estimated, that, 
in the middle ages, the black death, within six 
years, took away twenty-five million victims, — 
one quarter of Europe ; in some towns, half 
the inhabitants. But, in these very days in 
which we live, death sweeps away from the 
earth every year a population equal to three- 
fourths of the United States. We need not, 
therefore, turn to exceptional and violent mani- 
festations of the power of Him who cuts down 
earth's inhabitants. It is the common every- 
day mortality which is the most alarming. In 
many homes, in this very hour, mothers are 
closing the eyes of their babes, or children 
are watching the passing breath of father or 
mother. In some house, the wife is this mo- 
ment clinging to the hand of her husband, not 
willing to believe that he is dead: in some 
other house, the husband is holding in his arms 
the clay, not yet cold, of his dead wife. Many 
a physician is now watching by a death-bed, 
noticing the changes wrought by approaching 
death. " By the stillness of the sharpened 
features," says one, "by the blackness of the 



NEAR HOME. 57 

tearless eye, by the fixedness of the smileless 
mouth, by the deadening tints, by the con- 
tracted brow, the dilating nostril, we know 
that the soul is soon to leave its mortal tene- 
ment, and is already closing its windows, and 
putting out its fires." 

In how many cases is life no sooner begun 
than it is done. Children are born, merely to 
die. Lines of death straightway gird about 
every one entering this world, — infantile dis- 
eases, and unnumbered perils in childhood and 
youth. In adult life, also, diseases lie down 
like spies in our bodies, ready to attack us any 
moment we are off our guard. The presence 
of the deadly enemy may, perhaps, be never 
suspected, till suddenly, as by the lightning 
stroke, the strong man falls at his work. Si- 
lent decay is upon us, so that our life naturally 
runs into death, like a river running into the 
sea ; falling into it suddenly, as a cataract ; or, 
by lingering disease, the life plays with the tides 
of death for a long time before it yields itself 
up. In the market, the street, the field, our 
houses, or the house of God, we often see those 



58 



THE SILENT HOUSE. 



who have upon them the signs of death, or who 
have the dying at their homes. Our first ques- 
tion is, " How is your health ? " or, " How is 
my friend ? " lest, since we last took that hand, 
death may have touched it. Often we go into 
a company, thinking that there will soon be so 
many funerals as there are persons present. 
Sometimes we fix our eyes upon a particular 
man, and imagine how he will look when his 
clay is cold, and his face is upturned in the 
coffin, waiting the last gaze of his companions. 
How soon will those who bear the dead go into 
every house in a neighborhood, and carry the 
men out, that their bodies may be planted in 
God's acre. Death is so near us, that at all 
funerals it is the dead burying their dead : those 
who are about to die bury those just dead. 
All our stouggle of life is to run away from 
death. Men busily patch up the body, as 
some half-ruined building, even when the soul, 
— for which the body was made, and to make 
room for which the body will soon be torn 
down, — is left hungry, naked, wounded, dying 
of neglect. 



NEAR HOME. 59 

Could we be introduced into every hospital, 
every infirmary, every sick-chamber, and see 
Death's servants preparing for his coming, we 
should suddenly fear. It is likely we should be 
of the same mind as Thomas Fuller, when he 
debated of the different modes of dying, and 
said frankly, " None please me ; " but added, 
that it were ill in the mark to choose the arrow 
by which it should be hit. Death shoots his 
arrows all around us ; and the longer we escape, 
the greater the wonder. The engines of death 
pour a continual storm of weapons into the 
citadel of life. The elements around us conspire 
with elements within the body to lay beauty 
and strength low in the dust. This world was 
designed for the abode of a dying race. Heat 
and cold and damp, extremes of temperature, 
and sudden changes, are servants to bring men 
to the house appointed for all the living. Death 
is always watching. He sees a woman going 
often out into the cold winds with bare head, 
and with shoulders exposed ; and some morning 
he shoots his dart into her unshielded sides. 
The death-angel goes into the real estate busi- 



60 THE SILENT HOUSE. 

i 
ness in city and village, and among country 

farms. Certain unhealthy locations seem to be 
set apart for him ; and whoever builds a house 
on these death-lands has life shortened. Fever 
and consumption, and a great variety of dis- 
eases, spring up out of the deadly soil, and seize 
any one found within the fatal precinct. Every 
spring and autumn in New England we have 
frequent sudden changes of temperature, each 
one of which sows the seeds of death in cer- 
tain human bodies; and then the next series 
of severe changes, that occurs a few months 
later, carries off those enfeebled bodies. The 
autumn reaps what the spring has sown ; or 
the spring gathers what the autumn has planted. 
We commonly say of one whose disease is de- 
veloped one season, that the next change will 
finish the work. So Death is busy, sowing and 
reaping evermore. A rise of two or three de- 
* grees of cold above the average winter weather 
takes away a multitude of old people. There 
are, also, acute diseases, whose office is quickly 
fulfilled. What is it to lie down and die ? It 
is to take a little cold, to keep quiet a few days, 



NEAR HOME. 61 

to have a short delirium, and enter upon the 
last sleep. Perhaps there is some sickness re- 
quiring only hours instead of days. 

These diseases are so common," that they are 
unheeded bv the multitude. Men see so much 
of sickness and of dying, that they are indif- 
ferent. So I have read, that, during a long 
siege at the rock of Gibraltar, the soldiers 
became so accustomed to danger, that they 
would not move from their places when they 
saw bomb-shells smoking through the air, and 
about to burst at their sides : the officers had 
hard work to stir them up. Is it needful for us 
to have warning voices from men, because we 
will not heed the warnings given us by Death 
himself? Diseases and infirmities are warnings. 
Are th.ej unheeded ? There is a fable, that a 
man once made a contract with Death, that he 
should have three warnings before he should be 
borne away ; and one day he was surprised, 
amid all his common affairs, by the appearance 
of the dread messenger come for him. 

" How is this ? " he said. " You agreed to 
give me three warnings." 



62 



THE SILENT HOUSE. 



Death answered, " I gave you the warnings ; 
but you did not notice them." 

There comes, to every man and woman, a 
time when a part of life's burden must be 
definitely laid aside as too heavy. It is found 
that strength is failing. It is long before 
the fact is confessed, and long before one 
can settle down to doing less than formerly; 
but by and by the new habits are adjusted, 
and the remaining years are on another plane. 
This crisis occurs, sometimes early, sometimes 
late, often in middle life. It is a premonition 
of death. It is the first parallel occupied in 
the approach of death, besieging life's fortress. 
The enemy is drawing nearer and nearer ; the 
lines are more circumscribed ; and we shall 
fall before him. Instead of complaining of 
ill health, which is only Death knocking at 
our door, let us thank God if he does not break 
in on us without warning. 



To-day let every man hear the warning, " Set 
thy house in order, for thou must die." Al- 
ready the death of dear ones, or one's own 



NEAR HOME. 63 

bodily weakness, says that death is near. Fre- 
quent bereavement, and the signs of death hang- 
ing about our own persons, ought to make us 
amazed at ourselves, — it is madness unspeak- 
able, — if we defer taking decisive action in 
preparing to meet God. It is written that 
" death is always sudden to him who has not 
shaken off his sins." 

How soon men will speak of us as already 
dead ! In one of my walks I met an aged man 
who had been brought up some hundreds of 
miles to the eastward ; and he had some forms 
of speech unfamiliar to our New England ears. 

" Who has gone home to-day ? " he asked. 

And I wondered what he meant. He had 
heard the tolling bell, and asked, " Who has 
gone home ? '' Some one had gone to the nar- 
row house, and to the everlasting home, — to 
wretchedness or joys eternal. Gone home ! 
There is no home here. Soon the passing bell 
will lead that man to ask concerning you, "Who 
has gone home to-day?" Where will be your 
home ? You will go to your own place. Soon 
Death will put his finger upon your ears, and 



64 



THE SILENT HOUSE. 



shut out all sound of salvation. Hear, then, 
to-day. " To dress the soul for a funeral," says 
Jeremy Taylor, "is not a work to be despatched 
at one meeting." In the midst of the common 
business of life, the wise man will pause, and 
make his peace with God, and refuse to engage 
in any thing else till this be done. So did 
Montcalm, at Quebec, saying, — 

" I'll neither give orders, nor interfere any 
further. I have business to attend to of greater 
moment than your ruined garrison and this 
wretched country. My time is short : I shall 
pass this night with God, and prepare myself 
for death." 

Do we not all, in this very hour, recall a 
death-bed scene in which some loved one has 
passed away ? And, as we bring to mind the 
solemn reflections of that hour, are we not 
ready to hear and to heed the voice with which 
■a dying wife once addressed him who stood sob- 
bing by her side : — 

" My dear husband, live for one thing, and 
only one thing ; just one thing, — the glory of 
God, the glory of God ! " 



THE DARK DAYS. 65 



III. 

THE DARK DAYS. 

* ' Never have I known 
That the base perish: such the gods protect, 
Delighting from the realms of death to snatch 
The crafty and the guileful; but the just 
And generous they in ruin always sink. 
How for these things shall we account, or how 
Approve them ? ' ' 

So sang the Greek poet. 1 And in one of the 
sweet songs of Israel we read, "For I was 
envious at the foolish when I saw the prosper- 
ity of the wicked. For there are no bands in 
their death ; but their strength is firm. They 
are not in trouble as other men; neither are 
they plagued like other men. ... Is there 
knowledge in the Most High? Behold these 
are the ungodly, who prosper in the world ; they 

1 Sophocles: Philoctetes. 



66 



THE SILENT HOUSE. 



increase in riches. Verily I have cleansed my 
heart in vain, and washed my hands in innocen- 
cy. . . . When I thought to know this, it was 
too painful for me, until I went into the sanc- 
tuary of God; then understood I their end." 

We cannot justify the ways of God to men 
till we go into the sanctuary, and there, under 
the divine light and guidance, seek to solve the 
problems that perplex us. We ourselves have 
often noticed the apparent prosperity of men of 
marked wickedness ; and it has not been always 
clear to us that their death has been in obe- 
dience to the divine behest, or that, in dying, 
they have had any peculiar sense of the folly 
of their lives, with compunctions of conscience, 
and decided apprehensions of spiritual evil 
beyond the grave. We have said, " There are 
no bands in their death." When, however, we 
bring this, matter to the test of the sanctuary, 
we understand better the divine word and prov- 
idence. Wicked men are removed from the 
world in obedience to a divine law of moral 
progress in this universe ; and though the most 
die heedlessly, as they live, it is sometimes true, 



THE DARK DAYS, 67 

that, in the dying-hour, the bands of the wicked 
gather about them, and their future life is over- 
hung with gloom. Not unfrequently the valley 
of death appears very dark ; and, alarmed by a 
sense of sin and vague terror, they confess the 
vanity of all merely earthly pursuits and pleas- 
ures. It is suitable, therefore, to enter into the 
sanctuary, and seek to know the end of the 
ungodly. And we shall need no very laborious 
studies to discover, with the writer of the He- 
brew song, that it is a mistake to say of wicked 
men, that there are no bands in their death. 
Their dying-days are days of darkness. 

I will, at first, ask how often you have 
thought of the relief which this world experi- 
ences when hardened sinners are taken away ? 
It must be a galling reflection to a dying man 
to think, that, after all his life-work, the most 
intelligent and the best men are glad to be rid 
of him, or, at the least, feel that he is no loss, 
that moral goodness will triumph the sooner 
for his departure. It is, however, a consoling 
thought to those who have the best interests of 



68 . THE SILENT HOUSE. 

mankind at heart, that Death serves a very im- 
portant part in removing from the world those 
who hinder the advancement of God's kin^- 
dom. If the moral universe is to go forward, 
some way must be found, not only for advan- 
cing holy souls to their final reward, but also for 
transplanting the wicked to their own place. 
Death is, therefore, the messenger of God, 
bearing his sons heavenward, and also ridding 
this world of the most desperately depraved 
characters in it. 

Before the flood, it seemed as if wickedness 
was well-nigh immortal ; and this world became 
a sort of hell, quenched only by opening the 
windows of heaven, and breaking up the deep. 
Surpassing skill and power and hardihood in 
sinning increased with every year of their 
lengthened lives. If, also, we turn the other 
way, and look forward to the millennial state, 
we are apt to think, from the hints of Scripture, 
that life will be much longer then than now. 
This, in itself, will be a certain preparation for 
the falling-away to come thereafter ; when long- 
lived depravity will stalk abroad, with guilt 



THE DARK DA VS. 69 

like that of the antideluvians which will then 
be cut off by a flood of fire. It is, therefore, 
a mercy to-day, which cuts off bad men in 
comparative immaturity. If all the uneasy 
schemers of past ages could have lived till 
now, their violence would have made the globe 
intolerable. If Alexander the Great could be 
still mapping out new conquests, or if Charles 
the Twelfth, Frederick, and Napoleon were still 
with us in immortal vigor ; and if the worst 
men now dead in America — Arnolds and Burrs 
— were still among us, the earth might well 
groan under the heavy burden. And if, side by 
side with them, we should see the men who 
have been valiant for truth in the earth, still 
contending in full vigor, it would seem that 
their mighty warfare might jostle some of them 
off this planet. Imagine Herod and John the 
Baptist, Paul and Nero, Luther and Leo, 
William the Silent and Charles the Fifth, Crom- 
well and the Cavaliers, contending for centuries, 
and still in the field of battle. If we could 
suppose such things to be, there would, doubt- 
less, be singular scenes on this globe, — many 



70 



THE SILENT HOUSE. 



mighty men entombed in dungeons, or immured 
effectually under the crushing weight of some 
lost cause. We are, therefore, to look upon 
Death as a great friend to the world in reliev- 
ing society of the worst men in it, — vigorous 
villains, — conveniently laying them away in 
cool graves. " These fierce passions of their 
minds," says an old Roman poet, " and these 
inveterate contentions, are composed to rest by 
the weight of a little dust thrown upon them." 
How often, in reading history, we find an un- 
looked-for death relieving an oppressed people, 
and defeating plots which threaten the nations. 
We are thus called, in a moment, to laugh over 
a new farce, instead of moaning over a new 
tragedy. There is, to confess the truth, some- 
thing a little comical in thinking of the mighty 
John of Austria, dying in a dovecot, and 
then his body dangling in three bags from 
troopers' saddles, and dashing through the 
country to find a tomb. Death revenged many 
men, when Charles the Bold " was found dead, 
naked and deserted, and with his face frozen 
into a pool of water." Death handles kings 



THE DARK DAYS. 71 

roughly when he gets hold of them. And, 
though their courtiers sometimes prop them up 
for a few days, he soon shows the sham. So 
Constantine's body was, after death, still kept 
in regal state, and his law still went out to the 
people as if he were alive ; but the worm and 
decay crept within the bright robes, and a soul- 
less emperor was soon powerless. The Peruvian 
incas were buried in 'great pomp; and in vast 
halls their bodies were stationed on thrones, in 
solemn rows, as if they were worshipping in the 
Court of Death ; but the fear of them passed 
away, and graceless robbers overturned them in 
their hunt for treasures. Many a ploughshare 
has driven right on over the hearts of mighty 
men. The honorable tombs of ancient cities 
have fallen into the dust ; and there is no man 
to do honor to forgotten heroes. Goethe saw an 
Italian shoemaker using the head of the statue 
of a Roman emperor for his lapstone. We may, 
therefore, quietly console ourselves, and think 
contemptuously of the short-lived threats of 
wicked men, as Socrates did, when it was told 
him, " The thirty tyrants have sentenced thee 



2 



THE SILENT HOUSE. 



to death." — "And Nature, them," he answered. 
Even in this life, the arms of the wicked shall be 
broken. The wicked cease from troubling, and 
the weary have rest ; the prisoners rest together ; 
they hear not the voice of the oppressor. 



Allow me, for another point, to call to your 
notice the fact, that, when they go down to die, 
the wicked are often filled with strange alarms 
as they remember their sins. It is not said that 
this is usually the case ; but it is not unfre- 
quently so. And some degree of terror is so 
common, that it may be suitably numbered as 
one of the bands in the death of the wicked. 

It is, indeed, true, that the multitude do not 
appear to be disquieted. A careless life is often 
closed by hard indifference upon the death-bed. 
Those who have spent their lives in stifling 
conscience now find it easy to conceal their 
religious emotions, and die with ill-affected 
resignation, or sink sullenly into the grave. 
Some are like stage-players when the curtain 
drops. " Have I played well my part ? ' : asked 
the dying Augustus. " Then give me your 



THE DARK DAYS. 73 

applause." " Let down the curtain : the farce 
is over," said the dying Rabelais. High over 
the cemeteries, in the great French Revolu- 
tion, hung the motto, " Here is eternal sleep." 
" Sprinkle me with perfumes, crown me with 
iiowers, that I may thus enter upon eternal 
sleep," said the dying Mirabeau. When Dan- 
ton stood upon the scaffold, his self-conceit did 
not slink away even at the fatal block: "Thou 
wilt show my head to the people. It is worth 
showing." When Charles the Second of Eng- 
land was dying, — a bad Protestant and good 
Catholic, — he did not forget that native polite- 
ness and lightness which won him the title 
" Merry Monarch," which jested even in the 
presence of death. He could not leave the 
world without an apology to those around him 
for the trouble he had made them ; saying to 
those who had waited long, that he had been 
a most unconscionable time dying, but hoped 
they would excuse it. There is, with venerable 
though less illustrious authority, an old report, 
that, when Henry the Eighth was given over by 
the physicians, he called for a glass of sack, and, 



74 



THE SILENT HOUSE. 



after lie had finished it, said in a jest, " All's 
gone, all's gone," — and died. The first Darius 
thought it an epitaph worthy of himself: "I 
could drink a great deal of wine, and bore it 
well." The Koman Emperor Vitellius, on the 
approach of death, drank himself drunk. So 
men have died like brutes. Nameless men in 
every generation go down to their graves with- 
out apparent trepidation. Atheists have plead- 
ed for a life of infamy, and a death that asks 
no question. De St. Evremond, who made 
the pursuit of pleasure his chief study for fifty 
years, was asked in the dying-hour if he would 
" have a priest to reconcile him with " — "I 
lost my stomach, I'd fain be reconciled with it," 
was his quick answer. So hardened rogues jest 
under the gallows. Let it not be supposed, 
however, that indifference or jocularity in the 
presence of death is a sign that one's spirit- 
ual state is what it should be. It is, on the 
other hand, a mere proof of God's permission 
that the moral stupor of life should be unshocked 
by death. Those who reject God to-day may 
not care any thing md*e for Him when they 



THE DARK DAYS. 75 

come to die. It is not uncommon to meet those 
who are physically insensible to clanger. Their 
animal constitutions are so vigorous that their 
nerves never fail. They will stand on the deck 
when the ship is about to go down, with as little 
mental emotion as they would experience in 
taking a salt water bath on a beach. I have 
known such men. It is not so much courage as 
stupidity. They are more calm than bullocks 
would be under the circumstances, because they 
have been trained to more self-control. And we 
may not be surprised when they die, as they have 
lived, without a sense of sin. Perhaps their 
consciousness of guilt was quenched years be- 
fore ; and they are calm now, in dying, because 
they have been already so long unanimated by 
spiritual life. It is the quiet of a diseased body 
just about to slough itself off from the dead 
soul. "With this penalty is a sinner punished," 
says Augustine, " that, when he dieth he forget- 
eth himself, who, in his lifetime, thought not 
upon God." This accounts for the fact which 
Ave often find in our common life, where impeni- 
tent men die so contentedly, that it is asked, 



76 THE SILENT HOUSE. 

"Was not this a Christian's death ? " Domestic 
friends are comforted by it ; and unbelief takes 
new courage. 

But we have abundant evidence that this is, 
not unfrequently, far otherwise. Whenever 
the stupor induced by disease allows one to 
realize that it is the death-bed to which he has 
come at last, it is not very uncommon to find 
men alarmed. Sometimes, long before the hour 
comes, a man starts with a sudden vision of 
his old sins, and for a little while has sober 
thoughts, as if fearing to fall at once into the 
hands of Infinite Holiness and Justice Im- 
mutable. "When one supposes himself,'' says 
Plato, " near the point of death, there enter into 
his soul fear and anxieties respecting things 
before unheeded; for then the old traditions 
concerning Hades — how those who in this life 
have been guilty of wrong must there suffer 
the penalty of their crimes — torment his soul. 
He looks back upon his past life, and if he 
finds in the record many sins, like one start- 
ing from a frightful dream, he is terrified, and 
filled with foreboding fears." That was the 



THE DARK DAYS. 77 

way wicked Greeks felt in view of death, 
twenty-three hundred years ago. We have, 
besides this ancient witness, the words of a 
pastor in France, a few generations since, whose 
observation of the manner in which his gay 
countrymen died led him to say, " The moment 
of death is a fatal period, in which are united 
the excesses of our youth, the distractions of 
our manhood, the avarice of our old age. Our 
pride, our ambition, our impurity, our covetous- 
ness, our treacheries, our perjuries, our calum- 
nies, our blasphemies, our lukewarmness, our 
profanations, all these crimes will " [over our 
death-beds] " form one black cloud, heavy, and 
hanging ready to burst on our heads." A pas- 
tor in Old England, in the time of Cromwell, 
has also told us how the people of his pastor- 
ate were affected by their coming to the verge 
of life. " There are," he says, " few of the 
stoutest hearts but will hear us on their death- 
beds, though they scorned us before. They 
will then be tame as lambs, who were before as 
untractable as madmen. I find not one in ten 
of the most obstinate, scornful wretches in the 



78 



THE SILENT HOUSE. 



parish, but, when they come to die, will humble 
themselves, confess their faults, seem penitent, 
and promise, if they should recover, to reform 
their lives. With what resolution will the 
worst of them seem to cast away their sins, 
exclaim against their follies and the vanities of 
the world when they see that death is in earnest 
with them ! '' Whenever or wherever we open 
the pages of history, we find the same story. 
Perhaps our attention is called by some one to 
" Nero, crying or creeping timorously to his 
death; " or, again, one points us to " Judas pale 
and trembling, full of anguish, 7 sorrow, and 
despair ; " or we are told to listen to " the 
groanings and intolerable agonies of Herod." 
William the Conqueror had no courage when 
he came upon his dying-bed. " Laden with 
many and grievous sins," he exclaimed, "I 
tremble ; and, being ready to be taken soon into 
'the terrible examination of God, I am ignorant 
what I should do. I have been brought up in 
feats of arms from my childhood ; I am greatly 
polluted with effusion of much blood; I can 
by no means number the evils I have clone these 



THE DARK DAYS. 79 

sixty-four years, for which. I ana now constrained, 
without stay, to render an account to the Just 
Judge." 

In this hand-to-hand struggle with death, the 
stoutest unbelievers have often given way, and 
have made some outcry like that of the dying 
apostate Julian, " O Galilean ! thou hast con- 
quered." Voltaire was shaken in his unbelief; 
and Paine died in mental terror. " If there is 
a God," said an English atheist in dying, — " if 
there is a God, I desire that He may have mercy 
on me." " These great realities," wrote a 
young nobleman, falling by the hand of dis- 
ease, " which, in the hours of mirth and vanity, 
I have treated as phantoms, as the idle dreams 
of superstitious beings, — these start forth, and 
dare me now in their most terrible demonstra- 
tion. My awakened conscience feels something 
of that eternal vengeance I have often defied." 
u That there is a God, I know," said the dying 
unbeliever, " because I continually feel the 
effects of His wrath ; that there is a hell, I am 
equally certain, having received an earnest of 
my inheritance there already in my heart ; that 



80 



THE SILENT HOUSE, 



there is a natural conscience, I now feel with, 
horror and amazement, being continually up- 
braided by it with my impieties, and all my 
sins are brought to my remembrance." 

It is not unlikely, therefore, that when we 
ourselves approach the grave, — if we are con- 
scious that all earthly things are fading from 
sight, — the sense of sin may become more and 
more vivid, and more and more terrible to 
bear, unless we have found faith in Christ as 
our personal Kedeemer. The experience of 
all the ages shows, that, according to the 
death-bed test, the only thing worth living for 
is to be a Christian. In hours of health, we 
know this to be true ; and it will be indorsed 
and made emphatic in our last moments, 
though it be then too late for normal and 
healthful spiritual action. 



■ It is time, however, to turn to another point. 
There is often, in the dying-hour, a free con- 
fession of the vanity of merely earthly pursuits 
and pleasures. 

Men live merrily in full sight of others dying 



THE DARK DAYS. 81 

around them ; and they can hardly pause for 
the funeral. Though the earth be dark with 
the gloomy reign of death, men kindle festive 
lights, and crowd around them, till their own 
turn comes to be snatched away. As, in the 
fifteenth century, it grew to be a custom among 
certain people in England and France to enter 
the catacombs, or to go elsewhere among the 
tombs, and hang up a skeleton for a banner, 
and dance under it, naming their grim amuse- 
ment " The Dance of Death : " so there are 
to-day, among us, myriads whose merriment 
in a dying world seems as unsuitable as that 
of the half-savage rioters of Gaul or Britain 
four hundred years ago. 

" The noisy world in masquerade 
Forgets the grave, the worm, the shade.' ' 

The sight of the cemetery, or the passing 
funeral-train, commonly calls forth no thought 
of our own mortality, unless some acquaintance 
or friend is buried, and not always then. 

But when careless men of business, and of 
high ambitions and eager pleasures, come to 

G 



82 



THE SILENT HOUSE. 



take their own turn at dying, they are some- 
times arrant cowards as any. Have you not 
seen men throwing up their treasures, their 
power, their pleasures, calling them all mere 
" vanity," when they stand upon the edge of 
the grave ? 

Riches are a vain thing for safety when the 
attack of the Pale Horse is imminent. Wealth 
cannot resist the hand of disease. The gilded 
vehicle will stop at the grave. The first use 
of money which was ever entered upon earthly 
records was the purchase of a burial-place. 
" The rich," says Augustine, " are like beasts 
of burden, carrying treasure all day, and at 
the night of death unladen: they carry to 
their graves only the bruises and marks of 
their toil.". Thomas Boston writes, " This 
world is a great inn on the road to eternity, 
to which thou art travelling. Thou art at- 
tended by these things, as servants belonging 
to the inn where thou lodgest : they wait upon 
thee while thou art there ; and, when thou 
goest away, they will convoy thee to the door. 
But they are not thine : they will not go away 



THE DARK DAYS. 83 

with thee, but return to wait on other stran- 
gers, as they did on thee." Cortes, having 
ravaged Mexico, on fleeing the city had to 
leave vast treasure on the floor of his late 
lodging-place : so the man of wealth, called 
into eternity, suddenly quits his grasp, drops 
his sovereigns and crowns, and is off in haste. 
When the sweat-drops of the last agony fall 
on the coin, the shining turns to rust, the 
heaps look small. The greatness of dust piled 
up in the coffer looks mean when its owner's 
dust is about to be piled up in the coffin. 
" How much did he leave ? " asked my neigh- 
bor concerning a man just dead, who had been 
taxed for six hundred thousand dollars. " He 
left every dollar," was the answer. " Two 
hundred thousand pounds," said Erskine, — " a 
pretty sum to begin the next world with ! ' 
So feels the victim with no further use for 
earthly currency. " Why," said the dying 
Eachel, as she gazed on the gifts of many 
princes, — " why have I to part with all 
these so soon?' Think not, my friends, to 
take comfort in wearing pearls to the edge 



84 



THE SILENT HOUSE. 



of the grave, since the tears of penitence are 
more precious than pearls in that hour. The 
Cardinal Mazarin, having two months to live, 
was found, with night-cap and dressing-gown, 
tottering through his gallery, pointing to his 
pictures, and crying, " Must I quit all these ? " 
And he asked, " Oh, my poor soul ! what will 
become of thee ? Whither wilt thou go ? " 
But, when the last hour came, he was dressed 
and painted, and had courtiers pass before 
him ; and he died with that kind of cards in 
Ri$ hands which seems most fit if one thinks 
of visiting at Satan's gate. How vain is the 
possession of all earthly treasure when the 
hour of parting comes ! 



; c Why dost thou heap up wealth which thou must quit, 
Or, what is worse, be left by it? 
Why dost thou load thyself when thou'rt to fly, 
O man ! ordained to die ? 

Why dost thou build up stately rooms on high, — 
Thou who art under ground to lie ? 
Thou sowest and plantest, but no fruit must see ; 
For Death, alas ! is reaping thee." 

And how vain a thing is the possession of all 



THE DARK DAYS. 85 

earthly power, when one is about to come under 
the reign of the powers of the world to come. 
The dying MeL grasped the badge of the 
Marshal of France, and said, " Alas ! this is a 
mighty fine thing in this country; but I am 
going to a country where it will be of no use to 
me." These are the words of Warwick the 
king-maker : — 

" Lo! now, my glory smeared in dust and blood! 
My parks, my walks, my manors that I had, 
Even now forsake me ; and of all my lands 
Is nothing left me but my body's length. 
Why, what is pomp, rule, reign, but earth and dust? 
And, live we how we can, yet die we must." 

It is a Spanish king dying, who says, " What 
doth all my glory profit, but that I have so 
much the more torment in my death ? " " I am 
already nothing," said Charles the Second of 
Spain, bursting into tears as he lay upon his 
dying-bed, tormented by the politicians who 
were henceforth to handle the kingdom. How 
soon is the man, whose word is every thing, 
made nothing by entering the tomb. Wolsey, 
for several years before he died, had been pre- 



86 



THE SILENT HOUSE. 



paring a magnificent monument of brass for 
himself by an Italian artist : but lie died dis- 
honored ; and his grave is now unknown. The 
king took the fittest part of the monument, and 
called it his own. After many years had passed, 
one man rose in England, who sought to honor 
the memory of Wolsey by furnishing tools and 
men to hunt for his remains; but, when he 
asked that others would contribute to bear part 
of the expense, only one person could be found 
in all the kingdom, and he was willing to give 
twelvepence to the project. Vanity of vani- 
ties! So true are the words of the Hebrew 
song : " Like sheep they are laid in the grave ; 
death shall feed on them." It was a Roman 
emperor who said, " I have been all; and all is 
nothing." On the morning before Prince Tal- 
leyrand died, there was found upon his table, 
near the bedside, a paper with these words : 
" The whole eighty-three years passed away, 
what cares ! what agitation ! what anxieties ! 
what sad complication ! And all without other 
result except great fatigue of body and mind, 
and disgust with regard to the past, and a pro- 



THE DARK DAYS. 87 

found sentiment of discouragement and despair 
with regard to the future." 

" Know," says the Koran, " that this present 
life is only a toy and a vain amusement." The 
heart is vacant when it has the whole world in 
it. Men of wealth and power, and men of 
pleasure, rarely speak well of this world when 
they leave it. One whom men called great, 
when he had lost the power of speech, upon his 
death-bed drew upon a sheet of paper two large 
ciphers to indicate that all of earth was merely 
— nothing, nothing. In such days of grief, we 
appreciate the old poet, who summed up the 
exceeding glory of this world as a " nothing be- 
tween two dishes ; " and we shame ourselves for 
having tried so long to get the cover off. Then 
it is that we compare pottage and the birth- 
right, the plumes of earth and the wings of 
angels. Oh, my friends, will you not abandon 
the world before the world abandons you ? 

I wish it were possible, in some way, for us 
to know how lonely will be the passage of the 
human soul from its earthly abode. It is this 



38 



THE SILENT HOUSE. 



sense of loneliness which makes it easy for one 
to cry out, confessing his sins, as if he were 
already before God, and to stand appalled in 
that presence which removes him from all he 
has clung to — every prop giving way in that 
hour. In this life, we are so crowded with 
company, and we are so engrossed with the 
mad strife for riches and power and pleas- 
ure, that we think little about the solitary 
journey each one of our souls is soon to make, 
as we quit all the earthly and move forward 
into the untried regions of eternity. In the 
very midst of all our schemes, we must soon 
stop to lie down and die ; and, when we do stop, 
we shall be left out of the great company with 
whom we are moving on the track of traffic. 
So I have read 1 that the Muslims, when they 
travel in the desert, always carry with them 
their grave-linen ; and it is often needed. For 
they sink suddenly under deadly disease, or 
they are overcome by theh; privations ; and, in 
the dangerous journey, their companions cannot 
wait for them to die or to recover. He, there- 

1 Lane's Egypt. 



THE DARK DAYS. 89 

fore, who falls out of the caravan by sickness, 
is often left to die alone, and to bury himself. 
He performs his ablutions with sand, and digs a 
trench in the treacherous floor of the desert : 
he covers himself all over, except his face, and 
then he waits for death. But he is no more 
lonely in the dying-hour than if he were to die 
amid a crowd of mourning friends ; for with 
each one, in dying, there comes the moment 
when the last farewell is uttered. The lips are 
pressed, and the hand is touched, for the last 
time ; the departing spirit turns away from the 
visions of this world, and the eye fastens on 
the unseen ; and henceforth the dying man is 
as lonely, so far as concerns earthly company, 
as if he were lying alone on the great plains of 
the distant West, or perishing amid the ice-floes 
of the North, or dying on a white reef amid 
the dashing surf of the South Sea, or going 
down in a foundered boat alone in mid-ocean. 
Whether one falls in the thick of fight, amid 
the roar of the battle-field and the movement 
of armies, or drops upon the crowded street, or 
breathes his last in some unknown hovel, — he 



90 THE SILENT HOUSE. 

is alone when he dies. Do you never think to 
commiserate the fate of the strangers who die, 
almost every day, in our large cities ? More 
than three hundred unknown persons die in 
New York every year. But these are no more 
lonely in the last struggling, when Death gains 
the mastery, than you and I shall be when we 
turn our faces from this world to enter the 
unseen. The loneliness of death to each one 
who passes through it is calculated to awaken 
thoughtfulness on the part of those who mer- 
rily live in crowds. The sensibilities of the 
most unheeding must be awakened by the near 
contemplation of the solitude of the soul in the 
liour of its last mortal agony. I would, there- 
fore, that we might keep this in mind ; that we 
may be able to say in that dread moment, " I 
am not alone, because the Father is with me." 

" Gay wanderer in a homeless world, 
Poor pilgrim to a dusty bier, 
On Time's great cycle darkly hurled 
From year to year, 
See in the sky these words unfurled : 
1 Thy home is here ! ' " 



SEARCHING FOR LIGHT. 91 



IV. 
SEARCHING FOR LIGHT. 

The Holy Family, upon their flight into 
Egypt, were attacked by two robbers. One, 
says the legend, relented, and bribed the other 
to spare Jesus and his parents ; and he hid 
them in a rocky cave that night. Mary prom- 
ised this man final pardon. He was the peni- 
tent thief to whom, when they were dying upon 
the cross together, Jesus said, " This day shalt 
thou be with me in paradise." We need not, 
however, resort to old story to account for the 
pardon of the penitent. The man was forgiven 
upon the same ground that we are now, — his 
repentance and faith. He believed in Christ 
when almost all the world rejected him. The 
evangelist does not intimate that he had delib- 
erately put off the day of repentance, planning 
to leave it till he should come to die, willing to 



92 



THE SILENT HOUSE. 



risk it. The emphasis of the case is not that 
the man was dying, but that he had great faith 
in Christ, who was at that moment crucified 
beside him as an impostor. This example gives 
no countenance to those who are crowding off 
the hour of their turning to God, hoping for 
mercy at last, after they have despised the 
mercy for years. There is, perhaps, no more 
abused passage in the Bible than this. 1 This 
poor thief is clung to by those who reject Jesus, 
dying at his side. 

Men commonly think that it will be time 
enough to repent when they are about to die. 
The grand business of life is left to be done in 
the last moments. The guilty and condemned 
have a reprieve of a few days to see if they 
will repent before the uncertain hour of execu- 
tion ; but they defer that for which their lives 
were lengthened, and think they will have time 
enough when they ascend the scaffold. 

No wonder is it that this is felt by some to 
be a most unmanly course. Do we only just 
begin to think upon living to God when life is 

1 Luke xxiii. 42, 43. 



SEARCHING FOR LIGHT, 93 

spent? Do we renounce the world only when 
the world is about to shake us off ? Some most 
honorable minds, therefore, declare it to be an 
insult to God to seek his grace in the dying- 
hour, after having deliberately despised it all 
one's lifetime. But the insult is in the wicked 
life, not in the penitent death. " I would 
rather be lost," said one pastor, " than become 
a Christian on my death-bed." But, when he 
said that, he little thought what it is to be lost. 
" I would rather continue to sin in the future 
than to repent in the last moment in which I 
may turn to God : " he would not say that. It 
is a most dastardly deed to live fighting against 
God, expecting to turn to him with a cry for 
pardon when the end of life approaches. Said 
a dying soldier to his mother, " If I live to get 
well, I will be a Christian ; but I will not throw 
the fag-end of my life in the face of the Al- 
mighty." And then he died. In a storm at 
sea, when all hope was gone, the sailors began 
to cry to God. But one wicked fellow would 
not pray. " No, no ! " said he. " I must not 
pray. I have lived in sin till now. I dare not 



94 



THE SILENT HOUSE. 



insult my Maker by offering him the very last 
clays of my miserable life. If I had the prospect 
of more years ahead, I would do it ; but now it 
is too late. I should have no confidence in my 
repentance at this late hour." When, however, 
the peril had passed, all the rest were wild in 
revelry ; but he turned with all his heart to the 
Saviour of men. The word of God gives no 
countenance to this sentiment of false manli- 
ness, which bids one continue impenitent another 
moment. The sin is in continuing to sin. It is 
no sin to repent, even on the death-bed. The 
aggravated insult to God lies far back, behind 
the dying-pillow. To contend against God in 
health is the great wickedness. If there be a 
sense of the guilt of this course, and a disposi- 
tion to go to Christ in the last moment, it ought 
to be encouraged. The dying thief may be 
suitably appealed to as one who had great and 
decisive faith in the very last act of life. " The 
whole Bible gives but one saving case ; one, 
that none might despair : only one, that none 
might presume." 

We should, on this account, deal faithfully 



SEARCHING FOR LIGHT. 95 

with those who are about to die. It is with 
them now or never. So long as strength 
remains to turn the eye to Christ, we are to say, 
"Look and live." So Moses lifted up the ser- 
pent in the wilderness, that the dying might 
turn the eye of faith that way. If we hesitate 
to alarm their false security, seeking to turn 
them heavenward, they in a moment slip from 
our grasp, and the opportunity is gone by for- 
ever. We are to deal boldly, as for eternity, 
and faithfully, as with our own souls. Yet 
persons are sometimes sick a year or two with a 
lingering disease ; and, only a few hours before 
they die, they express an expectation to get 
well : and never one word is said to them by 
their dearest friends about the nearness of 
eternal scenes. Better is it to shock the sense 
of false peace before it be too late ; better one 
faithful word which may make entrance for 
faith in God than to allow the shock to come, 
as come it must, when the door of mercy is 
shut. The decisive words of a loving heart are 
a less sad surprise than will be the sight of the 
world of wT>e. I once heard one of the most 



96 THE SILENT HOUSE. 

tender and affectionate women I ever knew 
speak words which shocked me to a friend 
who had only a few weeks to live ; but those 
words led the man to live forever. 

It is possible to exercise true repentance 
and faith upon the death-bed; but it is not 
probable that this step will be taken, or so 
taken as to give much assurance that all is 
well. Great disappointment is likely to over- 
take those who defer contrition for sin, and 
belief in Christ, till the last moment. The con- 
ditions of the death-bed are unfavorable for 
being born again, — so unfavorable, that it is 
impossible to count upon it; and the chances 
are greatly against it. 

Test this matter, for example, by what we 
call sudden death. Deaths which seem sudden 
to us differ less than might be supposed from 
death after some long sickness, and are, perhaps, 
little more surprising to those who die, since 
the moment wdien one first knows that he is to 
die always comes unlooked for. Again, these 
deaths are commonly supposed to be without 



SEARCHING FOR LIGHT. 97 

warning, and without time for decisive spiritual 
action. I believe this to be a mistake. Such 
facts as we know show that the mind can act 
more quickly than any physical agent which 
destroys life. Charles the Twelfth put forth the 
volition to grasp his sword-hilt between the 
time when a small cannon-shot struck his tem- 
ple, — crashing his brain, — and the cessation of 
the power to will. Men have, as we believe, 
truly turned to God when they were drowning ; 
their restored life has been fully given up to 
Him. The visions which the drowning some- 
times have of their past lives show how quickly 
the mind acts. The divine grace may act more 
quickly than the lightning-stroke. We are not 
to speak of those whose deaths seem sudden to 
us as dying unwarned ; besides the warning 
they have certainly had all their lives, they may 
have warning enough in the instant of death. 
The danger is, that those who do not repent 
under the admonitions of life will not repent 
in the moment when the soul takes its flight. 
When a gambler loses his head by a cannon- 
ball, and the cards in his hat fly in all directions, 
7 



98 



THE SILENT HOUSE. 



we are not apt to think that any holy volition 
is actually put forth ; but when his companion 
at the gun, losing his life by the same shot, 
lives a moment, takes his Bible from his pocket, 
and sends a triumphant Christian message to 
his wife, we believe that the volitions of the 
soul do not need long time to show their charac- 
ter. A soldier in the Eighty-sixth Illinois said 
that he obtained a hope in Christ in the battle 
of Chickamauga. I watched over a dying boy 
at Antietam ; and in his terrible agony he was 
glad to acknowledge Christ, and send a message 
to an impenitent mother to seek the Saviour. 
Bibles and prayer-books were found scattered 
where the wounded and dying were thickest at 
Gettysburg. Angels of mercy and the Spirit of 
God are busy upon battle-fields ; and the Lord 
looketh down from the height of his sanctuary 
to hear the groaning of the prisoner, and to 
loose those who are appointed to death. Prison- 
houses and hospitals have caused many to think 
of early instruction, and to listen to the voice 
of the Son of man. But it is true, upon the 
other hand, that there are so many things to 



SEARCHING FOR LIGHT. 99 

take off the mind upon battle-fields and in 
hospitals, that the men are likely to die without 
hope. They are not always made aware that 
they are near to death. Old soldiers have re- 
marked, that there is no place where there is so 
little thought of dying as in the midst of battle, 
and the movements of armies, and the excite- 
ments of new hospitals. Wherever men are 
when they depart, heedless dying is apt to 
follow heedless living ; and, while men may 
repent in a moment, it is not likely that many 
will do it. It is an appalling thought that an 
impenitent man may be fixed in his eternal 
abode in any hour. 

If we turn from cases of almost instantane- 
ous death, and look upon those patients who are 
carried off by acute diseases, after a few days 
or weeks of sickness, we find that those dis- 
eases approach so stealthily as to excite little 
alarm; and, when they once get hold, they 
so completely master the senses, that there is 
little opportunity for the mind to work as in 
hours of health. Thus this mode of death is, 
practically, almost as sudden as if one was 



100 



THE SILENT HOUSE. 



struck down in a moment. The slight begin- 
nings of these short and sharp sicknesses are 
most delusive. It is, most commonly, merely 
going to sleep, and waking up with the sense of 
having taken a sudden cold. So a young man 
on Niagara River went to sleep in his boat, in a 
quiet corner by the shore, and neglected — only 
neglected — to tie his craft. The wind rose, 
and swept him into the boiling current; and he, 
waked by the roughness of the water, shriek- 
ing, went over the falls. In a quiet, peaceful 
hour, he only slept, and neglected the means 
of salvation. Many a man, in like manner, 
goes to sleep, caring nothing for God, or the 
wrath to come, and wakes in the agonies of dis- 
ease, and hurries over the falls of death with no 
possibility of rescue. A man fresh from the 
pleasures of life lies down to pleasant dreams, 
and wakes, feeling somewhat ill, little thinking 
that it is the beginning of what proves to be 
his last sickness. To cheer himself up, he 
shuts out religious thought, and has only a 
light life. Friends will not say a word about 
religion, lest it " excite" the patient. Soon the 



SEARCHING FOR LIGHT. 101 

patient grows worse, and is unable to think con- 
nectedly of any thing ; then dies. How com- 
mon is this case. If you think a moment, you 
will recollect many who have merely taken 
cold, thought it nothing unusual, and then have 
died within a few days. At the first, they were 
not alarmed, and they did not care, any more 
than they had done, to repent, and look toward 
meeting God : and, when the disease had made 
some progress, they could not do it ; it was too 
late. A fever is often like a whirlwind sweep- 
ing over the soul, even if it spares the body in 
continued life. When a severe fever is past, 
there is usually no memory of it ; the daj r s or 
weeks are a blank. I have known persons 
who thought that they became Christians in 
those hours when their bodies were burning 
with fever, and then remembered nothing of 
it when they rose from their beds ; all passing 
from their minds like their delirious dreams. 
Yet, had they died in that state, friends might 
have clung to this hope of straw. It is true 
that the Lord may save in these fevered hours ; 
but the conditions for healthy, voluntary action, 



102 



THE SILENT HOUSE. 



are not favorable. A young woman who was 
in my congregation one Sabbath, and in eternity 
the next Sabbath, spent her hours upon the sick- 
bed in sharp cries of penitence, eagerly seizing 
on Christ as her Saviour ; amid great trembling 
and agony declaring a hope to be with him in 
paradise, then dying in doubt and delirium. 
It was "plain that her mental state favored the 
disease ; that she would have been more likely 
to have recovered, if her conscience had been 
quiet. Those who are putting off repentance 
till the death-bed need to have a care how they 
take a slight cold, and repent before they enter 
the sick-room. 

Neither is the case of those who die by slow 
and protracted disease more favorable for lead- 
ing the patients to repentance in their last days. 
Here, if anywhere, we might look to find that 
clear and decisive spiritual action in the sick- 
chamber, which many promise themselves in 
days of health. These forms of disease are apt 
to deceive their victims. The patients hope 
soon to be better ; and, in most cases, their 
friends do not tell them how ill they are. 



SEARCHING FOR LIGHT. 103 

Though they may be shocked at the first bad 
symptoms, they are then easier, and get used to 
being sick. It seems to them that there is still 
time enough to repent, — not to-day ; their old 
habits of delaying cling to them. Every 
one's observation will recall cases where the 
matter has been put off to the very end, and 
the soul has gone out into the dark. 

I should not be true to my observations in 
parochial life, if I did not allude to the singular 
hostility to religious conversation which is not 
unfrequently manifested by impenitent persons 
who are slowly dying by lingering disease. 
They do not wish to recognize their physical or 
their spiritual condition. Said Capt. Paget, in 
the story, " I am not aware that I am at my last 
gasp, or that I need to be talked to by my own 
daughter as if I were on my death-bed. . . . 
The gospel is all very well in its place, — during 
Sunday-morning service ; . . . but I consider, 
that, when a man is ill, there is a considerable 
want of tact in bringing the subject of religion 
before him in any obtrusive manner." And, as 
often as any way, the friends are ready to join 



104 



THE SILENT HOUSE. 



' in giving false security. Perhaps they are god- 
less, and dread, as the patient does, any near 
vision of eternity. Mistress Quickly could not 
comfort Sir John Falstaff by praying ; so she 
told him her hope that there was no pressing 
occasion for it : — 

" So 'a cried out, 4 God, God, God ! ' three or 
four times. Now I, to comfort him, bid him, 'a 
should not think of God : I hoped there was no 
need to trouble himself with any such thoughts 

yet." 

I have spent so many vain hours in trying to 
arouse invalids to the necessity of preparing for 
death, or in the attempt to awaken the spiritual 
energies of their family friends, that I am less 
hopeful than once of finding the long days and 
wearisome nights of the sick-room leading men 
to God. It is now more than a thousand years 
since it was written by the devout Hindu sage, 
" Let virtuous deeds be done quickly, before 
the cough comes, making the tongue silent." 
But men are slow to heed the warning. 

It may be said, in general, that, near the close 
of life, the vital powers are so low, there is little 



SEARCHING FOR LIGHT. 105 

strength for healthy decision. " In that scene 
of pitiable feebleness, when one cannot help 
himself to a draught of water, or compose his 
mind to make a single request ; when he must 
look to his attendants to turn his poor head on 
his pillow, and to wipe the fast-gathering 
death-sweat from his brow, — in that hour of 
besetting pain and gathering agonies, who but 
a madman would deliberately choose to settle 
those momentous questions on which the eter- 
nity of the soul depends ? " Those who are 
familiar with the sick-bed know that the 
patient is often too weak to think much. The 
dying have no strength to seize upon the cross. 
They are come to the end of life without prep- 
aration for it ; and their powers are gone 
before they know it. A young man who was 
slowly dying told me that he was not able to 
think much, or to hear much, that he could not 
" attend ; " he heard as if he heard not ; his 
mind had sense only of the mastery of disease. 
One of my neighbors was told by his pastor, 
" You must go to Christ." The reply was, 
" I have no mind to go anywhere." Ask your 



106 



THE SILENT HOUSE. 



physician whether the dying-bed is a favora- 
ble place to repent ; and he will tell you that 
patients are usually too feeble to do any thing 
which requires much thought. When the fatal 
disease has made some progress, the hour will 
return no more. Pastors, feeling how impera- 
tive it is to prepare the dying for death, will, 
nevertheless, say frankly that they think there 
is little use in going to impenitent death-beds, 
hoping to rescue the souls of men. It is too 
late to do any thing for these friends. The time 
past has been all squandered, and the time 
present is already pre-occupied by death. The 
wise pastor feels that the patient belongs not to 
him, but to the physician ; and it is not deemed 
wise to talk much with the sick, or to agitate 
topics which produce excitement. It is impos- 
sible to attend then to the concerns which 
should have occupied a life-time. If one gets 
cold to-night, and has pneumonia to-morrow, 
his pastor cannot talk with him on the way of 
life, even though he die the day following. 
Every little while, I have heard that one of my 
neighbors is suddenly very sick ; and I have, 



SEARCHING FOR LIGHT. 107 

in sadness, said, " It is too late, too late : I can 
only pray for him now." Therefore it is that 
I go to my neighbor in the honr of health, 
saying, " Do not be false to yourself. Do you 
quiet your own spirit when you stand on the 
edge of the grave, ready at any time to step 
into it, and knowing that disease and the death- 
bed will unfit the soul for the needed action." 

There is, however, another consideration. 
Not only is it true that the conditions of the 
close of life are unfavorable to turning to God 
in the exercise of faith ; but, even if there be 
what is called repentance upon the death-bed, 
the chances are, that it is not genuine. The 
hope is most likely ill founded. 

The last days of anxious illness, when the 
bodily ailment is the engrossing care, are unfa- 
vorable for learning the way of salvation. It 
is amazing that so many members of Christian 
congregations have given little attention to 
what they have heard, and that, when they 
come to die, they are ignorant of just what to 
do to make their peace with God. Persons 



108 



THE SILENT HOUSE. 



have confessed to me upon the sick-bed, that 
they have borne dull and heavy ears to the 
house of God. But, even if the way be clear, 
it would seem as if the dying repent not so 
much of choice as of hard necessity ; it is a 
desperate case with them. Besides, their men- 
tal states, in the hours of extreme weakness, 
are little to be relied on. If persons have 
depended upon a death-bed repentance, and, 
when the fatal hour strikes, they express re- 
grets for an ill-spent life, and compunctions of 
conscience, — even then, their so-called repent- 
ance may afford no solid ground of security. 
" When a wicked man dieth, his expectation 
shall perish ; and the hope of the unjust man 
perisheth." 

It is true, indeed, that domestic friends may 
cling to such sick-bed experiences, and eagerly 
look in the direction of hope and light ; but 
•there can be no well-grounded proof : the ques- 
tion hangs in doubt. It is impossible for one 
upon a dying-bed to give good evidence of 
having become a Christian : the only test is a 
Christian life. " If ye continue in my word, 
then are ye my disciples indeed." 



SEARCHING FOR LIGHT. 109 

Those who have had the best opportunities 
for judging — aged physicians of large prac- 
tice, and pastors with wide and varied experi- 
ence — say that the evidence is strongly against 
the value of what is sometimes called death-bed 
repentance ; since, in those cases where the 
patients recover, it is found that the state is not 
abiding. An English physician kept a record 
of three hundred cases in which persons sup- 
posed that they became Christians while upon a 
sick-bed, and afterwards recovered ; and only 
ten out of the whole number gave good evi- 
dence of a changed life. An American physi- 
cian, who kept a similar record, counted only 
three out of a hundred. City pastors, who go 
to the dying almost every day, find, of all those 
who Ure anxious for themselves in their' last 
hours, scarcely one a year giving satisfactory 
ground for hope. The fact is, that, when the 
human soul is so hardened in sin as not to 
repent and believe in health, one is not likely 
to make a radical change when the powers of 
body and mind are prostrated by sickness. And 
though it is true that there are some remarkable 



110 



THE SILENT HOUSE. 



cases of conversion in time of severe sickness, 
in which the persons, upon recovery, prove to 
be really renewed, yet it must be considered 
the common rule, that purposes formed under 
the agonies of disease and the excitement of 
an expected death, do not stand against the 
temptations of life. Practically, for myself, I 
have so little confidence in sick-bed experiences, 
that I do not look to see men become Christians 
when they are sick, who would not when they 
were well. Death-bed baptisms, as anciently 
practised, were deemed so worthless, that we 
find Athanasius relating to his people an anec- 
dote of the angel, who once complained of his 
episcopal predecessor for sending him so many 
" sacks, carefully sealed up, with nothing what- 
ever inside." 

There is so little probability that men will 
suitably attend to life's business when they 
-come to die; and there is so little evidence, 
when it is attempted, that it is successful ; we 
must consider it most prejudicial to speak very 
confidently of the well-being of those who 
have led most godless lives, and then expressed 



SEARCHING FOR LIGHT. \\\ 

contrition, and received unction, when they 
could not well do otherwise. Whatever we 
may hope in our hearts, we can say little. 1 

Christian faithfulness may not neglect the 
dying ; but it is to spend itself chiefly upon the 
living. Turn we from the house of the dying 
to the home of the living, and we find the next 
neighbor persisting in delaying repentance, 
putting it off, perchance, to the death-bed hour. 
I miss faces from my congregation, and I mourn 
over them ; but the saddest thought is for those 
in health, who defer the time for returning to 
the heavenly Father. 

It is to them that I now turn, affectionately 
asking, — Do you say that it is never too late 
to repent ? I answer, that it is never too 
early to repent. It is a desperate amusement 
to play at a game of hazards, to see how near 
you can come to missing heaven, and yet 
enter. What you are in health, you will pro- 
bably continue to be in death. The moral 

1 "Spera, quia unus; time, quia solus." Hope, because 
there is one ; fear, because there is but one. 



112 



THE SILENT HOUSE. 



stupor induced by habits of sin may hold 
sway over the soul in the last hours. Or, 
if you are terrified at the approach of the 
grave, little use, my friends, will it be for me 
to go to you when you are under that strange 
excitement of dying ; there will be no respite 
in which I can quiet your well-grounded alarms. 
Let me entreat you, rather, in the full glow of 
health to-day, to form an intimate friendship 
with One, who, when your eyes become dim, 
will light up your pathway, and lead you 
through the dark valley in peace. 



THE LIGHT. 113 



THE LIGHT. 

There is a constitutional fear of death, 
which cannot be overcome by moral consid- 
erations, any more than our instinctive fear 
of fire. The law of self-preservation draws us 
away from death. We shrink from the act 
of dying. It was this, perhaps, which Plato 
alluded to, when he spoke of " the child within 
us, who trembles before death." The love of 
life and the fear of death are implanted in our 
natures to protect us: they call upon us to 
stand aloof, so long as may be, from the hour 
in which we shall give up this known mode of 
being, and take up that which lies beyond it. 
The sensations of the hour of departure are so 
unique, that men do not willingly encounter 
them. It is well that it is so, else many would 
be tempted, when weary, to cast off life, and 

8 



114 



THE SILENT HOUSE. 



hasten to the eternal awards. Many fear death 
as an executioner ; but it is the constitutional 
dread of the act of dying, which keeps men 
from rushing in crowds to that "bourn whence 
no traveller returns." 

This instinct of our natures is right, not 
wrong. And no person should try to reason it 
away upon moral grounds. It does not argue 
that one is not truly loving God, and earnestly 
desiring the best spiritual gifts, because one 
shrinks from the gateway of the tomb. " Is it 
anywhere written in the New Testament that 
j^ou shall not fear death ? It is a privilege not 
to fear it ; but a duty it is not." l 

We certainlv should not allow this fear to 
torment us. If we receive the testimony of 
physicians, and recall our own observation at 
the bedsides of the dying, we must believe that 
it is an easy thing to die. Leaving out of 
account that which greets the soul just beyond 
the veil, the mere physical phenomena accom- 
panying death are not to be dreaded so much 
as is commonly supposed. There is no doubt 

1 Mountford's Euthanasy. 



THE LIGHT 115 

that the physical contortions which are thought 
to be evidences of pain, and which sometimes 
so distress those who linger in the room, are 
most usually passed through in a state of 
unconsciousness. In the last hours, the dying 
are most frequently in a state of stupor, which 
bears with it a sense of repose. This numbness 
preceding death alleviates physical pain, even 
when it is so slight as to allow the dying some 
use of the raind in conversing with friends up 
to the very moment of departure. The pains 
before dying are incident to the disease ; the 
patient might suffer the same, if he were to 
recover : these pains are no part of dying. As 
death approaches, the patient becomes less con- 
scious of suffering. Death is the cessation of 
sensibility ; so that there can be no suffering at 
the very close, when sensibility becomes extinct. 
One passes from life to death almost insensibly, 
so far as concerns physical pain. The crisis 
comes and goes in merely closing the eyes to 
the earthly, and opening them upon the eternal 
scenes ; the mind conscious all the time, but, 
like a traveller, one moment gazing on familiar 



116 



THE SILENT HOUSE, 



faces, and the next moment seeing beyond the 
ken of earthly sight. 1 

Then it is that there often comes about that 
mysterious change which restores the face to 
the look it had in health. The body calms 
itself after the soul has left it. Before death, 
there may be an expression ftf care and weak- 
ness and suffering ; but, as soon as the vital 
functions cease, the body, as if by instinct, 
composes itself for a quiet and natural sleep, 
the face not uncommonly putting on that 
beauty of character which was worn in days 
of health. We behold then that which is far 
more lovely than any flowers that adorn the 
casket, a beauty which no sculptor can equal, — 
the cold chiselled features of the marble dead. 
Poets and men of letters have commemorated 
this change in the body, when passion is stilled, 
and the face is glorified. And we who walk in 
humbler ranks have noticed in our own hours of 
sorrow that the young appear more mature, and 
the aged brow smoother, after Death has placed 

1 Tide Papillon, Nature and Life, p. 309, American edition ; 
and, more fully, Philip, Nature of Sleep and Death, pp. 197, 
219, 228, &o. : London, 1834. 



THE LIGHT. 117 

his seal upon the clay ; and we have seen that 
faces which have been pinched and sharpened 
by poverty sometimes come to wear the peace 
of God, as though the radiance of heaven shone 
upon them ; and we are conscious of having 
less fear of death after gazing upon these 
changes wrought by the last sleep. 

Probably it is the constitutional fear of death 
which leads so many minds to look toward the 
dwelling-place of the dead with feelings of 
gloom. When men are downcast through the 
final failure of their grandest ambitions, they 
naturally fall into a churchyard style of talk, 
like the despairing king in the old tragedy : — 

"Of comfort no man speak ; 
Let's talk of graves and worms and epitaphs ; 
Make dust our paper, and with rainy eyes 
Write sorrow on the bosom of the earth. ' ' 

It is the thought which every man has of his 
own destiny, — to lie down, some day, in God's 
acre, — that casts a shadow upon the burial- 
ground. Men think of 

11 The knell, the shroud, the mattock, and the grave, 
The deep damp vault, the darkness, and the worm." 



118 



THE SILENT HOUSE. 



It is impossible to estimate the influence of 
our Christian faith in giving more cheerful 
views of the act of dying and of the last 
resting-place. Anticipations of future good 
unconsciously lighten the weighty fears which 
attach to the death-bed, and make the grave a 
place of repose. These ideas have exerted 
their power during many centuries. The old 
Hebrews wrote that the dead slept with their 
fathers : " He giveth his beloved sleep." Of 
those to whom Christ appeared, it is written 
that " some are fallen asleep." " Lazarus 
sleepeth." " Stephen fell asleep." At the 
death of Christ, the saints which " slept " arose. 
The early Christians chose to use the word 
" cemetery," which means sleeping-place. At 
the first they wrote over all Christian graves, 
" He rests in peace." When unbelief came in, 
it was written, " May he rest in peace ! " If we 
look upon death as a sleep, there is something 
very attractive in those parcels of ground 
which are set apart for " the noiseless kingdom 
of the dead." The Egyptian custom of adorn- 
ing the burial-place, and bestowing less care 



THE LIGHT 119 

upon the homes of the living, made the tombs 
of the rich far less repulsive than the hovels 
of the poor. 1 The beauty of many modern 
cemeteries accords with our highest Christian 
sentiments, and with the most cheering customs 
of antiquity, in making the resting-places of 
the dead as home-like as possible. 

Some, indeed, have looked upon the last 
sleep with such singular favor as to anticipate 
it in an eccentric manner. Our New England 
lord, Lord Timothy Dexter, was not more wild 
than the kings of the Old World. Did not 
the royal father of Philip the II. place him- 
self in shroud and coffin, and hear his own 
dirge, and lie quietly for a time in his own 
tomb ? Philip the IV. used sometimes to 
repose in the niche he had selected for himself 
in the royal burial-place, and there meditate 

1 "The Egyptians call the houses of the living inns, 
because they remain there but a little while. The sepul- 
chres of the dead they call everlasting habitations, because 
they abide in the grave to infinite generations. Therefore 
they are not very curious in the building of their houses ; 
but, in beautifying their sepulchres, they leave nothing 
undone that can be thought of." — Diodorus Siculus. 



120 



THE SILENT HOUSE. 



on death. Mr. Jacox, 1 in his diligent compila- 
tion, also instances the case of the Spanish 
painter, Louis de Vargas, " who used to lie in 
a coffin some hours daily, meditating upon 
death." The historians, however, do not relate 
that these men lived better lives for their day- 
dreams concerning the last sleep. 

An old-time friend of mine, — whose general 
course of life was wholesome, but who had a 
most singular taste for visiting every cemetery 
within the circuit of her travels, and who 
made an old hearse her favorite seat when she 
lived in the house of an undertaker, — visited 
one of our great cities of the dead. And I 
have certain memoranda she made upon her 
visit, which are the more noteworthy as being, 
with a single exception, 2 the last literary work 
she undertook; and this writing itself was 
never finished. It was one bright May morning 
that she entered this home of the dead; and 
her own body was soon laid to rest with the 
other sleepers. She began by setting forth 
rhymes. 

1 At Nightfall and Midnight, pp. 396, 397. 2 Vide, p. 12. 



THE LIGHT. 121 

" In a city of marble palaces 
I walked at the break of day, 

When the gushing notes from the song-birds' throats, 
Echoed on every spray. 
No casement was opened to greet the morn, 
No children ran forth in glee." 

But the rhymes and the measure did not 
quite suit ; and they were left forever. I have 
taken in hand the rough notes, in pencilled 
prose, which indicate the line of thought she 
might have followed, if death had not inter- 
fered. Her imagination went back to remote 
antiquity", when, in geologic ages, this place was 
set apart and prepared for its present use. After 
this, it was, for many centuries, the home of the 
Indian. Even then, ancient trees were standing 
as hoary sentries upon these sweet hills ; and, 
when a great city grew up near by, this forest- 
clad mount and these quiet glens were famous 
for beauty. The living loved to walk here, and 
to dream of repose under the venerable shade. 
To-day this spot is densely peopled by a most 
varied population. " The old and the young, 
the rich and the poor, orators, singers, poets, 



122 



THE SILENT HOUSE. 



scholars, — all are here. But the poet has left 
his pen ; and the voice of song and of eloquent 
speech is silent. All children have left their 
play ; and their fathers and mothers have laid 
aside all busy cares. Here they sleep. Their 
chapel bell does not call them to prayer. There 
is no sound of strife or toil, nor any alarm of 
war. No thrill of earthly joy, or quivering of 
human sorrow, disturbs the sleepers. Winter 
and summer are alike to them. Neither sun- 
shine nor storm can penetrate the walls of their 
houses. Poverty and riches are not heeded ; 
and all the great social differences are made 
equal. Here is the dust of one who was long 
a servant in this house of death, a workman, 
who graded these walks, and trimmed those bor- 
ders ; and near at hand is the monument of 
one whom the world honored as an illustrious 
statesman. Not far off is the grave of a soldier 
who survived many fierce battles ; and here is 
the unhewn monument which marks the rest- 
ing-place of a beloved teacher whose words 
have gone throughout the world. Here they 
will sleep till the morning of the resurrection. 



THE LIGHT. 123 

These grassy nooks will all be occupied, and 
these bounds enlarged ; yet all will be filled, 
and some day this will be a sealed cemetery. 
Age after age a deeper solemnity will rest upon 
it. These oaks and pines will thrive, become 
venerable, and perish ; and other generations of 
trees will take their place. Distant shores may 
attract the tide of civilization; and men may 
visit this spot, as now they go to Thebes and 
Arabia Petrsea. 

" Whether we suffer our thoughts to wander 
in the mighty past, or reach out into the distant 
future, we are impressed with the brevity of 
this present life : it is a mere plank, to which 
we cling for an hour; and all around us are 
illimitable waters, whose shores there are none. 
I ask, 4 What, then, am I ? ' and I hear a voice 
from heaven declaring that my soul is more en- 
during than the material creation. This will be 
proved in the hour of the resurrection. These 
monuments of stone will endure till the names 
upon them become illegible, till granite and 
marble crumble under the action of frost and 
rain, the sunshine and the lichen; but there 



124 



THE SILENT HOUSE. 



will come a morning when these silent sleepers 
will start at the sound of the trumpet, and go 
forth to stand upon the right, or upon the left, 
of their final Judge." 

These notes were never touched again. The 
Death Angel came in, and called away the poet ; 
and her body is now resting by the side of her 
childhood companion. Neither was this child 
friend afraid to go to her rest ; for, after she had 
passed away, I found a little slip of paper in her 
Bible, with these words upon it : " Let us lie 
down in peace, and take our rest : it will not be 
an everlasting night, nor endless sleep." 

Caryl the commentator has said, that " sleep 
is a short death ; and death is but a long sleep." 
"I close mine eyes in security," are the words 
of Sir Thomas Browne, " content to take my 
leave of the sun, and sleep unto the resurrec- 
tion." This feeling of restfulness on the part 
of those who are about to die is in strong con- 
trast with the apprehensions entertained by 
many who keep much company with the guilty 
and unforgiven. It is common to meet those 
who have for years entertained gloomy views of 



THE LIGHT 125 

death, as if there were no hope ; blighting fears 
cursing the heart, of childhood, vexing middle 
life, and terrifying old age. Disguise it as we 
may, it is certain that many in our Christian 
communities have so great a dread of death, 
that they are ready to adopt the choice of 
Achilles, when he declared to the wisest of the 
Greeks that he would rather be a swineherd in 
this world than to walk the Elysian Fields ; or, 
to make the words of Euripides their own, 
" It is better to live ill than to die well." But 
those who persist in such pagan fears ought, at 
the least, to be cheered by even such poor hopes 
as some pagans have had. Was it not said, of 
old time, that one who was beloved of the gods 
asked Apollo for the best gift ? " At the end 
of seven days," was the answer, "it shall be 
granted." When the hour came, he closed his 
eyes in sweet sleep, and saw the earth no more 
forever. So great is the boon of immortality, 
that Plotinus thanked God that his soul was 
not tied to an undying body. Are there no 
evils in this life, that we should so cling to it ? 
Are there no hopes in the future ? There is, 



126 



THE SILENT HOUSE. 



according to Mr. Lecky, an old Irish legend 
concerning two islands in a certain lake in 
Minister. " Into the first, death could never 
enter ; but age, and the paroxysms of fearful 
suffering, were all known there; and they did 
their work, till the inhabitants, tired of their 
immortality, learned to look upon the opposite 
island as upon a haven of repose. They 
launched their barks upon its gloomy waters ; 
they touched its shore, and they were at rest." 
Richter says, that he once saw in his dreams 
an old man who was never to die, and that 
his life was full of sorrow. Having heavenly 
aspirations, he was chained to this globe. In 
the springtime he was miserable ; for the days 
of hope, prophesying of a better future, gave 
no hope to him. And if he heard the sound 
of music, which arouses all one's capacity for 
the infinite, he was unspeakably sad. When 
"he thought on God and truth and virtue, he 
grieved, knowing how little a child of earth 
would ever know of that which alone makes 
life a joy to the good man. And, when he 
looked toward the stars, he said, " So, then, I 



THE LIGHT 127 

am parted from you to all eternity by an impas- 
sible abyss. The great universe of suns is 
above, below, and round about me ; but I am 
chained to a little ball of dust and ashes." 

We need not turn to the New Testament 
story to discover one, who, amid pagan dark- 
ness, sought the heavenly light, and made con- 
stant preparation for the noble employments of 
a future life, by sturdy attempts to live nobly 
now. And to him death had no terror. " It 
would be ridiculous," said Socrates, "for a 
man, who, during his life, has habituated 
himself to live like one who was very near 
to death, to be afterwards distressed when this 
event actually overtook him. Shall one who 
verily loves wisdom, and entertains the strong 
hope that he shall find that which deserves 
this name nowhere except in the other world, 
instead of rejoicing to depart, be afflicted at 
dying? Does not the soul thus conditioned 
depart to that which is congenial to its nature, 
— to the unseen, the divine, the undying, the 
wise ? Arriving there, its lot is to be blessed, 
to be emancipated from error and ignorance, 



128 



THE SILENT HOUSE. 



fears, wild appetites, and all other earthly 
evils." 



We must, however, turn to the New Testa- 
ment story to find the fullest record of those 
principles which lead men to triumph over 
death, and find in the Christian Church the 
lives of those who have not only had no fear in 
the hour of departure, but have looked forward 
with intelligent joy, anticipating future blessed- 
ness. 

The great ground of fear in meeting Death is 
not so much the contest with him as that 
which lies beyond. " Death being a fact," said 
a wise man of the East, " I have no fear of it. 
That which I alone fear is not having lived 
well enough." Right living, and the immortal 
hope which comes with it, is best secured 
through our Christian faith. It is not only 
■true that Christianity has introduced into the 
world at large more cheerful views of death, 
but it has enabled multitudes of individual 
souls to approach the end of life in triumph. 
The Son of man was revealed "that through 



THE LIGHT. 129 

death lie might destroy him that had the power 
of death, that is, the devil; and deliver them 
who, through fear of death, were all their life- 
time subject to bondage." 

Our dread of dying is in part removed by 
the thought that Christ has honored the article 
of death by passing through it. We can 
certainly follow in the steps of the Master, 
although the foot thereby fall into the grave. 
Two men have gone to heaven without dying ; 
but God's Son chose the common lot, that we 
ourselves might pluck flowers from the garden 
of his burial, and adorn the mounds so dear to 
us. Death is only a change in the mode of 
existence. The Incarnate Word could pass 
through what we call death, and merely drop 
off the flesh ; the spiritual life remaining 
untouched. 

We are further taught in the New Testament, 
that the followers of Christ die in answer to 
the prayer of their Lord: "Father, I will that 
they also whom thou hast given me be with me 
where I am, that they may behold my glory." 
Every day God answers this prayer of Jesus. 



130 



THE SILENT HOUSE. 



" And, if I go and prepare a place for you," 
said our Saviour, " I will come again, and 
receive you unto myself, that where I am there 
ye may be also." " Having prepared a home 
for his children," adds the commentator, "he 
does not leave them to find their way to it alone 
and unguided ; but he comes back himself, and 
takes them there." Christ reaches out after his 
own, and comes eagerly to meet them, as he 
said he would. And, when he comes, the 
child of Christ does not fear : death is merely 
the coming of God's Son. " Tell them," said a 
South Hadley school-girl in dying, when she 
learned that her parents could not reach her 
before she saw the coming of the Son of man, 
— "tell them that Jesus called me, and I could 
not wait for them. ' For he that loveth father 
or mother more than me is not worthy of me.' ' 

Death is thus changed from a curse to a 
blessing. "What do you think of death?" 
asked one. " Why, when death comes, I shall 
smile upon him, if God smiles upon me." "My 
brother," said a young man when he saw the 
coming of the Saviour, " they call this the 



THE LIGHT 131 

River of Death. It is no such thing : it is 
the River of Life." 

1 ' Is that a death-bed where the Christian lies ? 
Yes, but not his: 'tis death itself there dies." 

Wherever the Angel of Death sees the mark 
of atoning blood sprinkled, he passes by. 

u Out of the shadow into the sun," 

is the fit epitaph for one who looks upon death 
as the day-dawn. The gloomy gates of death 
are illuminated by rays of celestial light. 
Death is a door, ushering from life to life. 
Chambers of painful disease are thus trans- 
formed into the ante-chambers of heaven : the 
door may suddenly open, leading one from earth 
to heaven in a moment. Death is the servant 
of God, leading us forward to undying life. 
" Death," says Dr. Sears, 1 " is a stage in human 
progress, to be passed as we would pass from 
childhood to youth, or from youth to mafihood, 
and with the same consciousness of an ever- 
unfolding nature." And, it is added, under 

1 Foregleams of Immortality. 



132 THE SILENT HOUSE. 

healthful conditions, "immortality would not 
come upon us by surprise, but as manhood 
comes upon youth, as childhood comes upon 
infancy, or as day comes upon the darkness, 
melting away the bars of night in soft surges of 
golden fire." 

It was written concerning the founder of 
the church that " he sojourned in the land of 
promise, as in a strange country, dwelling in 
tabernacles with Isaac and Jacob, the heirs 
with him of the same promise ; for he looked 
for a city which hath foundations, whose 
builder and maker is God." The mediaeval 
men commonly talked of heaven as " our coun- 
try," and this world as " the way," and all men 
as "travellers." It was an ordinary mode of 
speech : " We will do thus and so as long as we 
are ' in the way.' ' In accordance with this, we 
find the words of a French preacher of the 
seventeenth century : " He that travels in a 
strange country may gather some flowers in his 
passage, or take with him a few ears of corn ; 
but, if he be wise, he will never tarry to build 
him a palace." Life is a pilgrimage ; but our 



THE LIGHT, 133 

palmer's weeds will not be worn forever. And 
w T e ought to look on this world merely as on 
a field, — a field of labor, in which, indeed, we 
have a place to lodge, sometimes in one part of 
the field, sometimes in another ; but our home 
is in our Father's house ; and the call of Death 
sounds in our ears "like a friend's voice from 
a distant field, approaching through the dark- 
ness," asking us to go home. James Martineau 
has written, that " Death, under the Christian 
aspect, is but God's method of colonization, 
the transition from this mother-country of our 
race to the fairer and newer world of our 
emigration." The most eloquent among the 
Romans expressed himself in like manner : " I 
consider this world as a place which Nature 
never intended for my permanent abode ; and I 
look on my departure from it, not as being 
driven from my habitation, but simply as leav- 
ing an inn." This world does not offer a true 
home. It was a wise answer which Richard 
Baxter made upon his clying-bed to one who 
asked how he was, " Almost well, and nearly at 
home." " I am going home as fast as I can," 



134 



THE SILENT HOUSE. 



said another believer ; " and I bless God that I 
have a good home to go to." An eminent 
preacher represents the dying Christian as re- 
joicing in his nearness to the everlasting home : 
" Here, in this chamber, on this bed, my exile 
and my wanderings cease." So confident did a 
quaint German divine in the time of Luther 
feel concerning this home, that, when he was 
told his son could not reach his death-bed, he 
sent word to him that he need not hurry, for 
they should see one another in the eternal life. , 
It is this home-like feeling concerning the 
future state which leads many to desire to de- 
part, waiting day by day for Christ's coming, 
hearkening for his steps. " You have every 
thing to live for," it was said to one dying 
woman. But she answered, " I have every 
thing to die for." " Look up, and lift up your 
heads ; for your redemption draweth nigh." 
."What a superlatively grand and consoling 
idea is that of death!" says John Foster. 
" Without this radiant idea, this delightful 
morning star, indicating that the luminary of 
eternity is about to rise, life would, to my View, 



THE LIGHT, 135 

darken into midnight melancholy." Sailing on 
life's bitter sea, we rejoice with joy unspeaka- 
ble when we approach the land, and the high 
headlands of heaven heave in sight : in a day 
or two we shall touch the shore, and walk the 
streets of the better country. It will be a 
happy day, in which we are released from the 
earth, and bidden to ascend the skies. 

Is it not a day for song and flowers, when 
the dead are laid away in honor ? Is it not an 
hour for congratulation, when the children of 
mortality enter into the life everlasting ? Did 
not a pagan sage speak of the dying-day as 
the birthday of eternity ? Christians in former 
ages called death a new birth. 

" Mortals cried, — A man is dead : 
Angels sang, — A child is born." 

Those whose names are inscribed in the book 
of life are not to be counted with the dead. 
u Soon you will be numbered no more in the 
land of the living," said one very cautiously 
to a beloved friend. But she made answer, 
" Soon I shall be in the land of the living : 
now I am in the land of the dying." 



136 



THE SILENT HOUSE. 



It is the prospect of entering at once into 
the presence of the Bridegroom of the soul, 
which satisfies the longing of those who are 
about to die. " The nearer I come to death, 
somehow Jesus and I get nearer together," 
said an aged slave. Governor Dunlap of 
Maine weighed the words, as, slowly, with 
failing breath, he declared, " If I know any 
thing, I know that I love Christ." The dying 
Melancthon rejoiced that he should soon find 
out the harmony of the two natures of the 
man Christ Jesus. " Thou canst not see my 
face, and live," answered God to Moses ; and 
St. Austin replies, " Then, Lord, let me die, 
that I may see thy face." 

This nearness to Christ in the hour of dying 
has led some persons to feel impatient with 
the despondency of those around them, who 
appear to look toward heaven as a wild coast, 
upon which it is unfortunate for one to be 
cast. When a friend asked Payson whether 
he felt " reconciled " to die, he answers, " That 
word is too cold. I rejoice ; I triumph; I seem 
to be swimming in a river of pleasure. . . . 



THE LIGHT. 137 

The celestial city is now full in my view. . . . 
Nothing separates me from it but the river of 
death ; and that appears an insignificant rill, 
that may be crossed by a single step, whenever 
God shall give permission." I confess that 
I do not understand the use of this word 
" reconciled," when applied to a Christian's 
willingness to die. Do we ask a weary wan- 
derer, if he is merely " reconciled " to go to 
the heavenly home ? Is the sick man merely 
" reconciled" to get well? Is the hungVy man 
" reconciled " to enter on eternal feastings ? 
Is the thirsty man " reconciled '' to taste at 
last the fount of God ? Said an old martyr 
going to be burned, " Only two stiles more to 
get over, and I am at my Father's house." 
The Christian in conversion submits himself 
to God for all eternity ; and mere physical 
death, the entering into everlasting rest, is 
nothing concerning which we should quarrel 
with God, and talk about being ''reconciled." 
Let us, then, lie down quietly, not unwilling 
to go to our rest. We spend the day for God, 
and are glad when night comes. 



138 



THE SILENT HOUSE. 



Through our Christian faith the timid are 
made bold; and the humble in the earth 
triumph when they lie down to die. "Me 
certain Jesus Christ no forget poor Indian," 
said a red-man a hundred years ago. " Me 
never forget him one day. Me hope see him 
and pale missionary 'fore morning. Me no 
fear. Inside eyes all open like Lake Sa-hillan." 
Then he closed his bodily eyes, praying that 
Christ would make him white as snow, and 
beautiful as the rainbow. An aged woman 
of my acquaintance died a little while ago ; and 
she lifted up her hands, exclaiming, " They are 
coming ; they are coming ! Oh, how blissful is 
dying !' : What wonder that John Wesley's 
mother in dying, said, " Children, when I am 
dead, sing a song of praise to God"! Labor 
gives place to repose ; grief gives place to joy ; 
gloom gives place to glory ; sing, then, a song 
of praise to God. Among our own homes we 
have seen the triumphs of faith ; one and 
another and another calmly facing death, and 
with quietness or gladness entering into the 
presence of the unseen Saviour: An aged 



THE LIGHT 139 

father goes eagerly to repose in Christ, or one 
in the early bloom of manhood has faith with- 
out fear. A sister or a mother, during many 
months of wasting disease, has perfect rest, 
welcoming death afar off. We hear a voice, 
saying, " As soon as I close my eyes, I shall 
see the Saviour face to face; and I long to 
behold Him. ... I have had hold of the 
Saviour's hand all winter ; and now I want 
to see Him." 

From all our homes the people of God are 
gathering. " Heaven," says Robert Hall, " is 
attracting to itself whatever is congenial to its 
nature ; is enriching itself by the spoils of earth, 
and collecting within its capacious bosom what- 
ever is pure, permanent, and divine." And 
Robertson has said, " Every day his servants 
are dying modestly and peacefully ; not a word 
of victory on their lips, but Christ's deep 
triumph in their hearts; watching the slow 
progress of their own decay, and yet so far 
emancipated from personal anxiety, that they 
are still able to think and to plan for others ; 
not knowing that they are doing any great 



140 THE SILENT HOUSE. 

tiling. They die, and the world hears nothing 
of them ; and yet theirs was the completest 
victory. They came to the battlefield, — the 
field to which they had been looking forward 
all their lives ; and the enemy was not to be 
found. There was no foe to fight with." We 
ask, therefore, the triumphant question of Paul, 
" O death, where is thy sting ? O grave, where 
is thy victory ? " 

Is it not written, that " the harvest takes 
upon itself the color of the sun when it is ready 
to bow before the sickle " ? So, in preparing 
for heaven, the soul ripens for it ; and, already 
upon the bed of dying, it is " beginning to wear 
the golden coloring of the skies." The life- 
work prepares for an abundant entrance into 
the glory which is laid up for the Son of man 
and his servants. " Father, I have glorified 
thee on the earth : I have finished the work 
which thou gavest me to do. . . And now come 
I to thee." " The time of my departure is at 
hand. I have fought a good fight; I have 
finished my course ; I have kept the faith : 
henceforth there is laid up for me a crown of 



THE LIGHT. 



141 



righteousness, which the Lord, the righteous 
Judge, shall give me at that day ; and not to 
me only, but unto all them that love his appear- 
ing." We can little wonder, then, at the defiant 
words of the German reformer when he laughed 
his enemies to scorn : " They threaten us with 
death. If they were wise as they are unwise, 
they would threaten us with life." And we 
can but believe there are many quiet, unassum- 
ing persons who are in heart ready to rejoice 
in view of death, to take up triumphant words 
like those of Hugh M'Krail, the young Scotch 
Covenanter, who, in the close of his address 
to the people when he was brought to martyr- 
dom, hailed his future home : — " And now I 
leave off to speak any more to creatures, and 
turn my speech to thee, O Lord. And now 
I begin my intercourse with God, which shall 
never be broken off. Farewell, father and 
mother, friends and relations; farewell, the 
world and all delights; farewell, meat and 
drink; farewell, sun, moon, and stars. Wel- 
come, God and Father ; welcome, sweet Jesus, 
the Mediator of the New Covenant ; welcome, 



142 THE SILENT HOUSE. 

blessed Spirit of grace, and God of all consola- 
tion ; welcome, glory ; welcome, eternal life ; 
welcome, death. O Lord, into thy hands I 
commit my spirit ; for thou hast redeemed my 
soul, Lord God of truth." 



* ' The tongues of dying men 
Enforce attention, like deep harmony." 

We are accustomed, I think, to lay no small 
stress upon the last words of those whose 
voices will be heard upon the earth no more 
forever. Yet the Bible places no peculiar em- 
phasis upon a triumphant death-bed, or the lack 
of it. An unrighteous prophet desired to die 
the death of the righteous ; but the ancient 
record gives few particulars relating to such a 
death. Indeed, the stoning of Stephen is 
almost the only instance in which we are per- 
mitted to be present to overhear the last words 
of any Bible saint. This silence is remarkable, 
else we are at fault in caring so much for the 
"tongues of dying men." It was the life of 
Paul, not his death, which was of value to the 



' THE LIGHT. 143 

world. The death-bed testimony impresses us 
only as it is the outgrowth of a life. The life 
is the test. Triumphant living is better than 
triumphant dying. Those who have already 
overcome sin and the fear of death count it no 
great victory if they conquer death itself. 
Those who have fought a good fight are ready 
to be offered. 

To die is to be taken only as a part of the 
straightforward work of life. It is a part of 
our business to die. And what matters it ? 
If we live, God dwells with us ; and, if we die, 
we dwell with God. 1 We find upon a tomb in 
Pompeii, cut in marble, a ship brought to an- 
chor, and the seamen furling the sails : Death 
brings the soul to harbor. " Heaven is as near 
by sea as it is by land," said Sir Humphrey 
Gilbert, as he sat, book in hand, upon the deck 
of his little craft, with mountain waves rising 
around him; and, when the wild midnight came, 
he took the watery way to heaven. " Heaven 
heaves in sight," said another man of the sea. 

1 These were, in substance, the words of a Scotch pastor 
near the close of life. 



144 THE SILENT HOUSE. 

The next day he said, " I am almost in; " and, 
the next day, — "Let go the anchor." He 
quietly sailed into heaven just as he had many 
times into port. By compass, by common 
sense, crowding on all sail ; by long tacks, com- 
pelling even contrary winds to aid him ; by a 
good fight with wind and wave, — he found a 
quiet haven. " When Death calls the roll, be 
always ready to answer, c Here,' " was the old 
trapper's motto in Cooper's story. When an 
American general was told that he could live 
only a few hours, he answered, " Let the drum 
beat. . . . My knapsack is strung : I am ready 
to go." The commentator Bengel was sturdily 
opposed to all parade, — the making of a scene 
in the dying-hour. He stood to the business 
of correcting proof-sheets as usual the day 
when Death called upon him. Shall we not do 
well if we can die in the earnest work of the 
"daily life, like a man in battle, falling in hot 
blood, and thinking nothing about the last 
breath, or the posture of dying? In some 
battle we shall perish, no matter when or 
where. Our only care is to fight the good 
fight. 



THE LIGHT. 145 

" What boots it where the high reward is given, 
Or whence the soul triumphant springs to heaven? " 

Upon removing the ashes of Vesuvius from a 
buried city, there was found a Roman senti- 
nel in armor, standing for eighteen hundred 
years in the place where his captain had placed 
him upon the fatal morning, — standing to his 
charge amid the terror and ruin of the perish- 
ing city. To do present duty, to die doing it, 
is more important than to behold unutterable 
glory in the dying moment. 

The strength and ripeness of character 
which make the earth mourn when good men 
are taken away is in itself the best preparation 
for the hour of departure. Precious in the 
sight of the Lord is the death of his saints. 
The life of his saints is precious to the Lord, 
but their death likewise. God's plans are not 
disturbed by the work of the Death Angel. 
The divine kingdom is still carried forward. 
" The withdrawal of any man from His harvest- 
field," said the missionary Judson, " however 
learned and wise and good, however well pre- 
pared, even by a life-long discipline, for that 
10 



146 THE SILENT HOUSE. 

particular field, is no loss to Him. As though 
the omnipotent God had so few weapons in his- 
armory, that we must tremble and faint at the 
loss of one." Is it possible that our own self- 
conceit makes us dread being cut off from our 
life work ? Does not God know where we may 
be most useful? Men are removed when their 
powers are ripe. - The merchant has just learned 
skill ; the physician, by hard years of toil, has 
become wise ; the earnest Christian has just 
found out how he can best serve the souls of 
men : has God no use for such instruments in a 
higher state of being ? This vigor of life and 
usefulness is the very preparation we need for 
the last hour. " It is nothing to die," said the 
aged Storrs of Braintree, " for one whose heart 
is all absorbed in Christ's service." When men 
are fully taken up with trying to do the Mas- 
ter's will in this world, we think of it as a very 
slight transition, if they are called upon to do 
God's will in another life. The one work pre- 
pares for the other. Concerning this and that 
venerable Christian disciple, we may say, — 



THE LIGHT. 147 

1 1 How well he fell asleep ! 
Like some proud river, widening towards the sea : 
Calmly and grandly, silently and deep, 
Life joined eternity." 

If we make it the leading question in life, 
How shall we live? we need not trouble our- 
selves with asking, How shall we die ? We 
begin to climb the true Jacob's ladder, round 
upon round, in each day's duties ; so ascending 
from earth to heaven. The quaint device of 
Goldsmith, in his "Vicar of Wakefield," may 
be suitably set before every man and every 
woman ; whereby, he would have the good wife 
train herself daily in the virtues she was most 
deficient in, that she might live up to the epi- 
taph her husband had prepared for her and 
placed before her eyes as a pattern. Live as 
you would die. A life in this world which ill 
accords with the realities of the future state is 
as inappropriate as the recording of jests upon 
a tombstone. " May we so live," was the 
Puritan prayer, " that to us a sudden death 
may be the most happy ! " I think that I 
should reverse the directions of an old book, 



148 THE SILENT HOUSE. 

in which it is written that we ought to think 
much about dying. " Art thou going to any 
meeting, or entering into any company, or 
marching to the holy assemblies? Discourse 
with thyself in this manner : It may be that I 
shall never go into any other company until 
I come to the church and congregation of the 
first-born, whose names are written in heaven." 
" Imagine that it may be this is the last time 
that thou shalt sit at the table ; that next thou 
mayst sit with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, with 
all the blessed martyrs ; . . . and that it may 
be thou shalt never taste any more, but of the 
food of the angels, and of the fruit of the tree 
of life ; and that thou shalt never drink, but of 
the new wine in the kingdom of heaven, and of 
the rivers of eternal pleasures that run from the 
throne of God." I would rather bid men 
think much about living, — living to the pur- 
pose, fulfilling life's noblest end. Art thou 
going to any meeting ? Consider how thou 
mayst bring men from this company to taste 
of angels' food, and to eat of the tree of life. 
Think how best you can bring those who sit at 



THE LIGHT. 149 

table with you, to sit clown with holy patri- 
archs and martyrs in their reward ; and forget 
not to bring to your table the hungry and poor 
of the earth. Then you need not care, whether, 
at next meal, you sit in this part of your 
Father's house, or hear the call to go up higher. 
It is this noble life which is its own best 
monument. " Lay me quietly in the earth," 
said John Howard : " place a sun-dial over my 
grave, and let me be forgotten." But men will 
never forget him. His life is always shining, 
like the sun, which hastens not to go down. 
He needs no sun-dial over his grave. We are 
glad that the grave of the Genevan Reformer 
is unknown. And we ourselves indorse the 
judgment, that " it is right that Luther's grave 
should be left without any inscription. All 
words would have been tame ; just as it would 
have been impossible to find a fitting inscrip- 
tion for the tombs of the apostles." Concern- 
ing the men whose fame is the possession of 
all mankind, we use the words of Pericles, 
" The whole earth is the sepulchre of illus- 
trious men." And, even concerning the most 



150 THE SILENT HOUSE. 

obscure men, we feel that their tombstones are 
matters of indifference, if their lives were 
noble. How many have lived on the earth, 
and died, leaving little more trace than a leaf 
which flourished one summer, and decayed a 
thousand years ago. Yet many of these name- 
less men have died with unspeakable dignity, 
having characters ripened and beautified with 
tints which will never fade ; whose influence 
on the earth, though apparently little as that 
of one leaf, is abiding as the life of the human 
race, which endures from generation to genera- 
tion, built up by individual lives ; as massive 
trees, which grow during thousands of years, 
are built up by single leaves. Is it written, 
" Blessed are the dead that die in the Lord " ? 
" Blessed are the valiant that have lived in the 
Lord," adds Thomas Carlyle. Henceforth they 
rest from their labors, and their works do 
follow them. " Give her of the fruit of her 
hands, and let her own works praise her in the 
gates," is the epitaph upon Mary Lyon's tomb- 
stone. Whether we are conscious of it, or not, 
our works, whatever they may be, will follow 



THE LIGHT. 151 

us. Happy are they whose works shall praise 
them in the gates. The word "Health" was 
written upon an ancient tombstone. Health, 
wholeness, holiness, are one in root. The holi- 
ness of saints is not perfected, not whole, till 
death completes life. When this life is rounded 
out by death, and the career of heaven is open 
to the soul, we shall do well if we write the 
word " Health " upon the tombstone. Con- 
cerning one who has lived wholly for God, and 
who has departed this life that he may con- 
tinue the service, we cannot say that he has 
died: he lives forevermore. Our Christian 
faith writes the word " Life " in the place of 
" Death." 



TOPICAL INDEX. 

STATING SUCH SUBDIVISIONS OF THE GENERAL SUBJECT 
AS ARE TREATED WITH SOME FULNESS. 



4 ___ 

PAGE. 

Bands in the death of the wicked .... 65-90 
Brevity of life, Scripture symbols of . . . 44-54 

Burial-places 117-124 

Death, by sin 9-12 

dance of 81 

awakening a sense of sin . . . .72, 76-80 
constitutional fear of . . . . 113-116, 125 

impartial 18-23 

indifference to the presence of . . 72-75, 80, 81 

inevitable 24-29 

loneliness of 87-90 

pictorial literature of ... 33-35 

preparation for . . . 36-41, 62-64, 111, 112 
of sinners a relief to the world . . 67-72 

sudden 29-36 

triumph over 127-142 

of unbelievers 79 

universal 12-18 

Diseases the instruments of death .... 55-62 

153 



154 



Topical Index. 





PAGE. 


Dying thief, the 


91, 92, 94 


Emptiness of earthly riches 


82-84 


power .... 


84-86 


pleasure . . 


87 


Faithful dealing with the dying .... 


95,96 


Repentance on the death-bed 


91-112 


thought to be offensive to God 


93,94 


true, unlikely in sudden death . 


96-99 


in acute diseases 


99-102 


in long sickness 


102, 103 


in the feebleness of clos- 




ing life . 


104-107 


apparent, not likely to be genuine 


107-111 


This year thou shalt die . . . 


42,43 


Triumphant living better than triumphant dying . 


142-151 



INDEX B. 

AUTHORS WHOSE NAMES ARE NOT MADE CLEAR 
IN THE TEXT. 



JEschyltjs, Of all the gods .... 
Boston, Thomas, Dust walking in dust . 
Browning, Mrs. E. B., referred to 

High heart, etc 

The plague runs 

Bryant, All that tread . 

Baxter, Richard, pastor in England . 

Cervantes, Death is deaf . 

Coleridge, S. T., Is that a death-bed? 

Cuyder, T. L., In that scene of pitiable, etc. 

Drelincourt, Charles, the editions of 

Death stops its ears ..... 
no respect for crowns or chains 

He that travels in a strange country 

Directions of an old book, "Art thou" and 

"Imagine" 

Epictetus, Why crowd the world 
Hadl, Robert, The wheels of Nature 
Herbert, George, Nothing between two dishes 

155 



PAGE. 
30 

12 

9 

20 

55 

13 

77 

30 

131 

104, 105 

3 

20 

21 

132 

147, 148 
17 
16 

87 



156 



Index B. 



Holmes, O. W., By the stillness 
Homer, The wind in autumn . . . 
Jacques, Jacques, canon of Auburn, — 

Death conversing with victims 
Longfellow, H. W., Spanish song, Our lives 
Murray, Here in this chamber 
Oeeviams, quaint German divine 
Saurin, pastor in France .... 
Shakspeaee, old play, Eichard II. . 

Justice Shallow 

Seven ages 

Words of Warwick .... 

Of comfort no man speak . 

Tongues of dying men .... 
Smith, Henry, 1550-1600, the Puritan pastor 
South, Robert, After . . . hours . . . night . 
Taylor, Jeremy, Nero, Judas, Herod 
Theodosius, epitaph, " Health" (Gibbon) . 
Thompson, A. C, Fifth chapter of Genesis 
Yirgll, These fierce passions 
Wallace, A. R., Changing names in Borneo 
Whittier, "I am," from Questions of Life . 
Young, Night Thoughts, All men think . 
Wise to-day . . 
The knell, the shroud 



PAGE. 

56 
47 

30 

23 

134 

134 

77 

21 

38 

49 

85 

117 

142 

52 

24 

78 

151 

16 

70 

25 

48 

39 

41 

117 









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